Three years ago, Amazon had revealed their plans for drone deliveries for the very first time.
They call it Prime Air - a special delivery option for Amazon Prime Customers where a fully autonomous drone delivers the order within 30 minutes.
Yesterday, Amazon announced that the very first drone delivery was successfully completed in Cambridge, UK.
The whole process, from ordering to the point of actually receiving the goods took only 13 minutes!
""Prime Air has great potential to enhance the services we already provide to millions of customers by providing rapid parcel delivery that will also increase the overall safety and efficiency of the transportation system"-Amazon
And what did the first ever customer of Prime Air order? An Amazon Fire TV Stick, and a bag of popcorn.
Whatever the customer has ordered gets packaged for delivery (the drone can carry up to 2.7 kg/ 5lbs) and then it flies up to 400ft high to deliver the package to the customer by itself, without any human interaction, and returns to the amazon center.
The first trial customers are located in Cambridge, close to a custom-built Amazon fulfillment center.
Amazon has only started with "a handful" for now, but want to expand and offer the service to dozens of customers in the local area soon.
The customer can only order via drone during daylight though, and only when the weather conditions are suitable (no rain/ snow/ fog).To make this possible, there was a lot of work behind the scenes required -
first of all, of course the technology to build a fully autonomous drone had to be developed and tested.
But then being allowed to try it wasn't that easy either, Amazon received a special permit that allowed them to execute drone flights beyond line-of-sight, which is normally illegal.
Of course, we are still very far from having drones deliver every amazon package, all over the world.
The company still has to face some major challenges - navigating in an urban area like London for example will be a lot more difficult for the drone than flying in the spacious countryside.
But still, this is a big step!
It shows that Amazon really wants to bring this idea to life, and that they're serious about it - proving everyone wrong who first laughed about this idea 3 years ago, or thinking it was a joke.
"One day, seeing Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road."-Amazon
Images: 1, 2, 3, Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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