The US online retail giant's revolutionary project still needs extra safety testing and federal approval, but the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos believes that Amazon "Prime Air" would be up and running within four to five years.
"These are effectively drones but there’s no reason that they can’t be used as delivery vehicles," Bezos told CBS television's "60 Minutes" program. "I know this looks like science fiction. It's not," he said.
"We can do half-hour delivery. . . and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds (2.3 kilograms), which covers 86 percent of the items that we deliver."
The body of the prototype drone is about the size of a flat-screen monitor, and it is attached to eight small helicopter rotors and sits on four tall legs.
The drone lifts off and whizzes into the air like a giant mechanical insect to deliver the package just 30 minutes after clicking the "pay" button on Amazon.com. Then it buzzes back into the air and returns to base.
The mini-drones are powered by environmentally friendly electric motors and can cover areas within a 10-mile (16-kilometer) radius of fulfillment centers, thus covering a significant portion of the population in urban areas.
The drones operate autonomously and follow the GPS coordinates they receive to drop the items off at target locations. "It’s very green, it’s better than driving trucks around," said Bezos.
He also claims they are safe; the prototype has redundant motors that will keep it in the air and prevent it from crashing.
"The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say, ‘Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood,'" Bezos told CBS.
Amazon said the octocopters would be "ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place," noting that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was hard at work hammering out rules for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Amazon projected a more optimistic timeline than Bezos himself for the project to be activated, saying the FAA's rules could be in place as early as 2015, and that Amazon Prime Air would be ready at that time.
NTJ/BA