Amazon's Drones Will Soon Blanket The Sky, Speeding Up Delivery Service

Amazon has its eyes on the sky to speed up its delivery service.

Last month, at Amazon’s re:MARS Conference, Jeff Wilke - CEO of the company’s worldwide consumer division introduced Amazon's drone Prime Air. The drone is autonomous and electric. It is said to able to fly as far as over 24km and ship packages of less than 2.2kg. With this drone, Prime customers can receive their packages within half of an hour. The program will be launched in the next few months, said Wilke in a statement.

As stated by Wilke, the drones will be powered by advanced algorithms and diverse sensors together with machine learning algorithms and proprietary computer-vision. Therefore, they can identify not only static but also moving objects in the process of delivery. Moreover, it is necessary that a delivery location’s surroundings are clear, which allows Amazon's drone to land safely.

However, it means it is impossible for the busy cities’ apartments unless helipads are available. In addition, to ensure safety as approaching the ground, explainable stereo vision in parallel with sophisticated AI algorithms will be applied so that Amazon's drone can detect humans and animals before landing.

Nonetheless, it is rarely flawless. Using proprietary algorithms is a favorite way of tech companies to solve many issues; however, it has been hard to see one deployed perfectly. For example, a weaponized or glitchy device can fly into one’s face by accident as a mental hunk. On the other hand, it can be attacked by hackers leading some bad effects.

Not to mention the risks, even when Amazon's drone can work faultlessly, it can lead to future dystopia. You can get mad as tiny machines wander continuously over your heads to increase the delivery speed. Moreover, this program and the world-class fulfillment and delivery network of Amazon is said to work in tandem. This means that workers have to work harder and harder to make the one-day delivery dream come true.

It is Amazon’s dream arising in 2013 and is forecasted to come true in 4 or 5 years. The company missed that timeline; however, it seems that it is a few months left to welcome the world where the troposphere is cluttered up with toilet paper, AirPods, and books packages and workers at Amazon have no choice of working really hard.