US federal regulators have given Amazon.com Inc a green light to begin testing drones, but it is likely to take years before the online retailer can start delivering packages by air to people’s homes.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Thursday gave Amazon permission to conduct test flights of its drones outdoors, as long as the company obeys rules such as flying below 122m and only during daylight.
In a sign of how far Amazon has to go before its vision for its drone-delivery service is realized, the company’s drones for now have to be operated by a pilot with a certificate to fly a private manned aircraft.
Amazon has envisioned its drone-delivery service, which it calls Amazon Prime Air, to be autonomous, consisting of buzzing fleets of miniature helicopters soaring far beyond the view of Amazon warehouses.
While the FAA has announced plans to allow more commercial uses of manned drones in the US, it has not said when it will permit the use of autonomous drones by companies such as Amazon. The agency’s main concern is making sure that drones, which everyone from farmers to cinematographers have shown interest in using for business purposes, can be operated safely.
Still, even getting permission to test drones outdoors with a pilot counts as progress for Amazon, which had been lobbying the FAA for approval to do so for months.
The company had previously been forced to test drones indoors near its headquarters in Seattle. It has also started outdoor tests outside the US and has warned federal regulators that jobs and investment dollars will leave the country if they do not relax their drone restrictions.
Now Amazon can test drones in the skies over a piece of private property, which it has previously disclosed is somewhere in rural Washington state.
The type of approval the FAA granted Amazon was not the company’s first choice. Called an experimental airworthiness certificate, it is normally granted to aerospace companies like Boeing Co and others that are conducting research and development on new drone technologies.
In a letter to the FAA in December last year, Amazon vice president of global public policy Paul Misener said the company had applied for the experimental certificate at the suggestion of the FAA, but complained of restrictions that would prevent it from rapidly experimenting.
Amazon has also requested a different type of approval from the FAA that would give it more flexibility in its drone tests, it said. The FAA has granted similar approvals for Hollywood film studios and other groups that want to use drones in their work.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day