LABEL Issue III
The Amazon Octocopters
Jeff Bezos floats the notion of delivering goods
by drones: the future and the fairy tale
Jeff Bezos is a true showman. The Amazon
founder father loves a good revelation, and
took the convenience afforded by a 60
Minutes segment to show off his company's
latest creation: drones that can deliver
packages up to 5 pounds to your house in less
than half an hour. They're technically
octocopters, as part of a project called
"Amazon Prime Air.” A drone sits at the end
of a conveyer belt, waiting to pick up a
package from the warehouse and carries them
up to 10 miles from the fulfilment centre
within 30 minutes provided the package
weighs below 5 pounds. And as per the
available statistics; 86 percent of the deliveries
that Amazon makes are below 5 pounds. So as
soon as the company
meets
the
required
federal regulations, we
can expect to see swanky
drones humming over
our roofs.
There has never been an
organisation quite like
Amazon. Perceived as an
online
book
seller,
Amazon has redesigned
itself time and again, changing the way the
world buys, peruses and counts. Amazon has
225 million customers around the globe. Its
goal is to sell everything to everyone.
Bezos played a trial video on 60 Minutes that
showed how the aircraft, also known as
octocopters, will pick up packages in small
yellow buckets at Amazon's warehouses and
fly through the air to deliver items to
customers after they hit the buy button online
at Amazon.com. The idea is to deliver
packages as quickly as possible using the
small, unmanned aircraft, through a service the
company is calling Prime Air, the CEO said.
Drones have been infamously used by the U.S.
military in the GWOT to shoot missiles at
enemy combatants in countries such as
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The cost of these
unmanned aircraft has dropped expeditiously
in recent years, making them more obtainable
to commercial users, such as companies, small
businesses and entrepreneurs. However, the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
currently limits the use of drones in the U.S. to
public entities such as police forces and
hobbyists, meaning the devices cannot be used
in return for payment. But this clashes with the
Amazon’s objectives.
Though the spending in the internet retail
sector has grown by leaps and bounds in the
last year, it still counts a factional portion of
the total holiday spending. This kind of
encouraging news is
making the companies
and their investors to
work more efficiently
towards the betterment of
the services they provide.
Online spending was
seen growing at around
20% in the last three
quarters. This financial
year the one fifth of the
total profit made by the S&P 500 companies
were from technical firms. The opportunity is
becoming so huge that the Amazon CEO, Jeff
Bezos, plans to invest in an army of flying
drones to deliver his packages. Needless to say
that if this plan materializes, that will be the
end of the road for many delivery companies.
Unlike popular theories and hypothesis, these
drones are autonomous and do not require a
controller in front of a monitor in the
warehouse to control them. The company
needs to give the drones instructions of which
GPS coordinates to go to, and they take off
and then fly to those GPS coordinates. But still
the program needs to be idiot-proof. In Jeff
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