Amazon prepping up to launch drones for faster delivery

09 Dec '13

2 min read

Online shoppers who cannot wait to lap up a fashion collection within minutes of its availability on web retailing sites, will soon be able to enjoy a faster delivery system as the world’s e-commerce pioneer Amazon.com is prepping up to launch a futuristic shipping device which can deliver the items in less than 30 minutes.

In an interview aired on CBS television network’s 60 Minutes program, the Seattle-based company CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos revealed that they are set to introduce drones, the unmanned aerial vehicles, to distribute the shipments right to the doorstep of the customer in almost half-an-hour time.

Named as Prime Air, the octocopters or delivery vehicles, shown through a demo video on the talk show, are incorporated with yellow rectangular buckets that have been enabled to carry objects weighing up to five pounds, which covers almost 86 percent of Amazon’s packages.

The 49-year-old founder of the company further explained that once a customer, whose address is within 10-mile radius from the fulfilment centres of the company, hits the buy button at Amazon.com, the aircraft will pick up packages and will fly through the air to drop the products at the given address.

Speaking more on the advantages of the new vehicles, Bezos said, “These are autonomous. So you give ‘em instructions of which GPS coordinates to go to, and they take off and they fly to those GPS coordinates.”

When quizzed how soon the drones will start taking flights, he answered, “I know it can’t be before 2015, because that’s the earliest we could get the rules from the FAA. My guess is that’s, that’s probably a little optimistic. But could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen.”

Founded in 1994, Amazon is an American multi-national company that operates separate retail websites for nations like the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Japan and China.

Fibre2fashion News Desk - India

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