Bezos' postmen: why drones will not become Amazon's main delivery method. Amazone drones, review, performance characteristics, application Drone delivery has huge potential on a global scale
A Google search for “Amazon drone” returns 313 million results. Even if the world's largest online retailer never delivers a single package using octocopters, the Sunday speech of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos () on the air of the program 60 Minutes on CBS has already helped the company a lot. According to ChannelAdvisor analysts, the Internet giant's sales on Cyber Monday, December 2, soared by 44% compared to last year (this, for example, is 2.5 times higher than IBM's result). “I don’t want anyone to think that we’re talking about the near future,” Bezos assured viewers.
However, few people listened to these words anymore.
Delivering online packages using smart aircraft has captured the minds of Amazon's multimillion-strong customer base and has become the number one topic in all leading technology and business publications. The futuristic plan of the company's CEO to recruit aerial robots that can land in your yard 30 minutes after ordering via GPS navigation sounds too good to be true. However, it is not true. For several reasons.
Firstly, the bright prospects of the project risk running into the realities of national legislation. As Bezos himself noted, in the United States, flying postal drones with packages on board is considered illegal. The Amazon CEO's statement that it will take two years to obtain government permission seems too optimistic. The American aviation regulator FAA confirms that the possibility of liberalizing conditions for drone flights is being discussed, but full certification of innovative devices cannot be expected before 2020.
Today, with FAA permission, only police and government drones can fly over US territory. Private devices are limited to projects of enthusiasts, who are strictly forbidden to lift their robots above 120 m and to let them out of sight. Congress has already passed a resolution to clear airspace for commercial use of drones starting in 2015. But for now these are just declarations of intent. Of course, Amazon will be actively testing the Prime Air delivery system in the coming years, but that doesn't mean the new service will be available on the retailer's website tomorrow or next quarter.
Secondly, the company has invested billions of dollars in recent years to build logistics centers that are not geographically designed for 30-minute drone flights. The half-hour deadline announced by Bezos for packages weighing up to 2.5 kg remains realistic if you live within a 16 km radius of an Amazon facility. Even this distance does not take into account force majeure, in which drones will not have to take a direct route, but will have to avoid obstacles and slow down due to weather conditions and no-fly zones. But let’s make a discount and agree: yes, the battery charge for the “octocopters” will be enough.
That's good news if you live in Carrollton, Texas, near Amazon's massive 100,000-square-foot sorting center. m in Coppell.
But the guys from the suburbs of Dallas are unlikely to need uninterrupted delivery of goods by drones.
The same is true in Florida, where the state's largest cities - Tampa and St. Petersburg - are close to the coveted radius, but are still inaccessible to Prime Air with the current functionality of flying postmen. In California, drones will be able to reach the relatively large San Bernadino (population 213,000) and Tracy (85,000), but residents of Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and San Diego will be left without packages.
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that Amazon will build new logistics facilities, but why, if in the States the retailer already has an extensive network of 52 distribution centers with a total warehouse area of 3.7 million square meters. m? Moreover, it was created with the obligatory condition of saving by renting land away from cities. So a radical change in strategy from a business point of view makes little sense for the company.
Here are some more arguments.
Delivery within urban areas- the project is utopian in practice. Even if drones perfectly learn to navigate in space and avoid collisions with each other and with foreign objects, navigating through areas of high-rise chaotic buildings with heterogeneous terrain will deprive them of their main advantage - speed. They will either have to fly too low, posing a threat to people and vehicles, or fly too high, where the wind can easily make adjustments to the speed and vector of movement.
And when, having overcome all the difficulties, the innovative postman approaches your home - what will happen next?
In apartment buildings, he will have to leave the package with the concierge. Considering that this is not always possible for live UPS couriers, fair doubts arise about the functionality of their electronic “colleagues”. Amazon claims that it has already built these risks into the invention. The most realistic solution takes away the futuristic flair from the whole idea: drones will place parcels in special containers at the nearest 7-Eleven store so that the recipient can pick them up at any time convenient for him. Another scenario, more intriguing in theory, is delivery to a balcony (although not all apartments have balconies).
The speed of drones is their absolute advantage, but it dictates strict requirements for the weight of the package.
Traditional delivery in this sense does not limit customers in any way. Yes, the parcel is not delivered within half an hour, but is this really so important? Google, eBay and others are constantly improving their same-day delivery services, and it's unlikely that online shopping users will be so impressed by Amazon's offering that they'll immediately opt for a slick but under-experienced alternative.
Weather is another important aspect that cannot be ignored. Weather conditions will inevitably regularly “ground” Bezos’ email robots. The magic of Amazon lies in its simplicity: you register, make a couple of clicks - and in a maximum of a couple of days (if you are a resident of the States) the item is in your home. Logistics, geography of sorting centers, any problems are not your concern.
The complex chain of the Bezos empire operates quietly and efficiently.
Let's imagine that the online giant built an enterprise near Boston and covered both the city itself and its satellites with the Prime Air service. Suddenly the weather suddenly deteriorates, you get sick and want to quickly order medicine without having to leave the house. However, on the Amazon website you will learn that the entire fleet of drones is forced to remain on the ground, as weather forecasters promise strong gusts of wind and snowfall. Not such a fantasy. Amazon's innovations have yet to prove their worth in combat conditions - only one package out of a thousand may not be delivered to the recipient, otherwise the drones will not meet the quality standards set by Bezos on the market. Yes, a robot can do amazing things, but a drone with eight propellers is too risky to fly in the sky in bad weather. So, bad weather is definitely one of the major threats to the bright future of mail drones.
The time has not come. Bezos' dreams are destined to come true, but not in the foreseeable future. As analyst Samil Shah correctly noted, Prime Air -
this is “either a joke, or a trick, or a PR stunt.”
“Or are they just provoking skeptics?” - he wrote on his Twitter. As a PR stunt, the drones really worked perfectly. And skeptics poured a lot of bile on Bezos. However, Amazon's CEO can play the long game like no other. He is already investing in technologies for the next decade, while most CEOs are thinking about how to get through the next quarter.
Amazon has been criticized a lot lately for violating labor laws. Well, in that case, Prime Air is good news for Bezos' subordinates: flying robots won't replace them anytime soon.
- the strangest of the large companies in the tech industry.
It's not as secretive as, say, Apple, but Jeff Bezos' company, the e-commerce and cloud storage giant, is very shady. She rarely explains her short-term tactical goals or long-term strategic vision. It's always a surprise.
Trying to understand Amazon is akin to Kremlinology (Western science of the behavior of Kremlin leaders - ed.). This is especially true of history in relation to one of the most important areas of this business: logistics, delivery of orders to customers.
Over the past few years, Amazon has signaled that it would radically change the way it delivers its products. Among other moves, the company was building its own fleet of trucks, introducing an Uber-like delivery service, building a slew of robotic warehouses, and continuing to invest in a far-reaching plan to use drones. Another flurry of activity came last week with the unveiling of the company's branded Boeing 767, one of 40 in the planned fleet.
The moves have led to speculation that Amazon is trying to replace the logistics companies it relies on - UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service - with its local service. These logistics investments also fuel the theory that Amazon has become unstoppable in US e-commerce, no doubt prompting Walmart, the world's largest retailer, to acquire brash Amazon rival Jet.com for $3.3 billion.
So what is Amazon's ultimate goal with delivery? After conversations with analysts, partners, competitors, and receiving a little insight from the company itself, I suspect that it has a two-tier vision of the future of consumer logistics.
First, it is not trying to replace other logistics companies. Instead, over the next few years, Amazon wants to expand its operations as much as possible, and is spending huge amounts of money on planes, trucks, crowdsourcing, and other new delivery services to increase capacity and efficiency.
Amazon's long-term goal is even more outlandish, and if successful, transformative for the entire business. The company wants to avoid the imperfections of roads and people. She longs for complete autonomy, in the sky. Amazon's drone program, which numerous tech publications already called marketing nonsense after Mr. Grimmick profiled it on "60 Minutes" in 2013, is at the center of this future. Drones will be combined with warehouses operated by robots and self-driving trucks, ushering in a new autonomous future for Amazon.
There are obstacles to realizing this vision. Drone delivery in the United States faces regulatory uncertainty and a myriad of technical and social challenges. Still, the experts I consulted said a future filled with autonomous drones is just around the corner, compared to a time dominated by self-driving cars.
“It’s a much easier task to fly than to drive,” said Keller Rinaudo, co-founder of Zipline, a drone delivery startup that plans to begin rolling out a medical delivery system in Rwanda this fall. “If we had regulatory approval, we would already be delivering to your home,” he added, referring to the San Francisco Bay Area.
If Amazon's drone program is successful - and the company says it's on track - it will fundamentally change its cost structure. In a recent report, Deutsche Bank analysts predicted that in ten years, drones will reduce the unit cost of each Amazon product by about one and a half times. If this happens, the economic threat to competitors will be very serious - “retail stores will cease to exist,” German analysts suggest, and we will live in a world more like the animated series “The Jetsons” than our own.
Delivery has always been at the center of Amazon's strategic investments. At the very beginning of its activity, the company, in order to reduce the cost of sales tax, deliberately located warehouses in states with low taxes and low population, and then shipped goods to populated areas within three to five days.
The introduction of Amazon's Prime subscription program, which offered customers two-day delivery for a year for $99, changed the commerce giant's needs. Prime made customers buy a lot more things and forced the company to work on logistics much faster.
This explains why Amazon abandoned its strategy of cutting sales taxes at the beginning of the decade and began building dozens of warehouses in densely populated areas. The company also began developing a system called "postal injection," which uses forecasting algorithms and network analysis to figure out how to deliver each package as quickly as possible to a customer's nearest post office in the United States. According to Deutsche Bank, the "postal injection" allowed Amazon to cut the cost of the most expensive part of delivery - the "last mile" from warehouses to customers' homes. So despite increasing the speed of logistics between 2010 and 2015, the company reduced its cost from $5.25 to $4.26 per box.
But this price is still not low enough for business. Despite the fact that according to recent reports, Amazon is generating astronomical revenues and the company is facing capacity constraints. Two years ago, during the holidays, a surge in online orders overwhelmed UPS, causing losses and delays.
In the long term, a larger problem looms: The United States' transportation infrastructure is aging, and the Department of Transportation warns that unless urgent and costly investments are made, roads, waterways, airports and other systems are at risk of collapse in the 40s. century.
For Amazon, this future is disastrous: the company's current investments in logistics—trucks, planes, and crowdsourced cars—rely on traditional logistics infrastructure. All investments except those made in drones - which explains why they are an integral part of the company's vision for the future of retail.
I first realized the importance of Amazon's drone program, called Amazon Prime Air, when I met Gur Kimchi, its leader, at an industry conference a few months ago. Although our conversation was conducted without a voice recorder, Mr. Kimchi answered my questions in such detail that I immediately abandoned my skepticism regarding this project.
When I started talking about Amazon's interest in autonomous aerial flight with other people in the drone industry, they all noted that drones offer a way to jump off the road by operating in a new, unobstructed layer of physical space up to 400 feet high, which is mostly parts of the country are not occupied. This opens up a vast area for logistics.
Other than posting a few videos, Amazon hasn't talked much about its self-driving program. But the company is working with regulators around the world to test the system, which involves drones delivering packages weighing up to 5 pounds - which accounts for 80 to 90 percent of all cargo.
Amazon also said it has built many drone prototypes for different delivery circumstances. The first flights will likely be in low- to medium-density populated areas, such as suburbs, where drone can land in backyard to drop cargo. But the company also indicated that it is working on delivery systems in cities - for example, drones could deliver goods to smart lockers placed on rooftops.
As often happens, the logistics company DHL has already tested such delivery to lockers in Germany; its representative told me that the test was successful, and the Germans plan to expand the technology if they receive regulatory approval. Amazon's patent applications hint at even more fantastical possibilities - drones could transport cargo between small depots located, for example, on lamp posts.
Other players are talking about even wilder ideas. Ryan Petersen, founder of logistics software company Flexport, said Amazon has submitted patent applications that plan to use trucks as mobile warehouses for delivery. These self-driving trucks, stocked with goods that Amazon thinks a given area might need, will roam around cities. When an order arrives, the drone can take off from the truck and fly to the customer's home, cutting delivery time literally to minutes.
Similar scenes are likely to await us in the distant future. But according to Amazon, the earliest drone deliveries will happen much sooner—we'll see it within five years, somewhere in our world.
Amazon Prime Air is a service that will deliver packages up to five pounds in 30 minutes or less using small drones.
How are you going to ensure safety?
Safety is our top priority. Our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies, as well as sophisticated “sense and avoid” technology. Additionally, through our testing, we will gather data to continue improving the safety and reliability of our systems and operations.
When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option?
We will deploy when and where we have the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision. We’re excited about this technology and one day using it to deliver packages to customers around the world in 30 minutes or less.
What will the Prime Air delivery vehicles look like?
We are testing many different vehicle designs and delivery mechanisms to discover how best to deliver packages in a variety of operating environments. The look and characteristics of the vehicles will continue to evolve over time.
Where are you building and testing?
We have Prime Air development centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France and Israel. We are testing the vehicles in multiple international locations.
How will Amazon integrate Prime Air vehicles into the airspace?
Safety and security are top priorities as we look to incorporate small drones into the airspace. We"re working with regulators and industry to design an air traffic management system that will recognize who is flying what drone, where they are flying, and whether they are adhering to operating requirements.
What did you announce at re:MARS?
We revealed our latest Prime Air delivery drone design. Our newest design includes advances in efficiency, stability and, most importantly, in safety. We also shared more information about Amazon’s sense and avoid technology and our efforts to build an independently safe and autonomous drone that will make the safe decision, even when faced with the unexpected. To watch a flight test video and learn more about our new drone and our safety systems, visit the Day One Blog post, .
The world's largest online retailer Amazon intends to test a system for delivering goods using unmanned drones. The head of the company, Jeff Bezos, announced this in an interview with CBS.
Bezos shared with reporters plans to develop a new product delivery system that will allow customers to receive their order within 30 minutes from the moment of placing it. Experts so far call this idea at least bold, and in some cases even futuristic. However, Amazon does not promise that the system will be put into permanent use tomorrow. Even with the most favorable test results, this will actually happen only in a few years, Bezos said.
Moreover, drone delivery will likely only be available through Amazon Prime for a fee. The head of Amazon admits that the system has both pros and cons.
The advantages are very obvious. This is primarily the speed of delivery, as well as minimal transportation costs on Amazon's part. Amazon drones will be able to deliver goods weighing no more than 2.3 kg and move away from the warehouse at a distance of no more than 16 km. According to Bezos, this radius will cover a significant part of the urban population. As for weight, only 14% do not pass this value. Amazon goods (that is, drones will be able to pick up and deliver 86% of all goods).
But the disadvantages, in turn, are no less significant, because each drone requires permission from the aviation authorities, and in addition, the retailer plans to use small drones, so they will not be able to deliver large cargo. Also, while traveling with an unmanned vehicle, various incidents may occur, for example, breakdown or theft by third parties, which entails the loss of the product itself.
However, Amazon still takes the issue quite seriously and intends to finish what it started. In addition to purely technical and legal problems, Bezos notes a number of other difficulties associated with implementing such a system on an ongoing basis. However, the desire for technological innovation clearly overcomes all doubts so far.
In the video you can see how Amazon's new delivery system works.
