Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed on Sunday that his company is looking to the future with plans to use “octocopter” mini-drones to fly small packages to consumers in just 30 minutes.
The US retail giant’s ambitious project still requires more safety testing and federal approval, but Bezos estimated that Amazon “Prime Air” would be up and running within four to five years.
A demo video posted on the company’s Web site showed the tiny robotic devices picking up packages in small yellow buckets from Amazon’s fulfillment centers and then whizzing through the air to deliver the items to customers just 30 minutes after they made their purchase on Amazon.com.
Photo: AFP
“I know this looks like science fiction. It’s not,” Bezos told CBS television’s 60 Minutes program.
“We can do half-hour delivery... and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds [2.3kg], which covers 86 percent of the items that we deliver,” he said.
The mini-drones are powered by electric motors and could cover areas within a 16km radius of fulfillment centers, thus covering a significant portion of the population in urban areas. They operate autonomously and drop the items at the target locations thanks to GPS coordinates transmitted to them.
“It’s very green, it’s better than driving trucks around,” Bezos said.
Amazon said the octocopters would be “ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” adding that the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was working on rules for unmanned aerial vehicles. It 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.
Bezos hinted that part of the motivation behind the mini-drones was to make sure Amazon remains on the cutting edge of the retail industry.
“Companies have short life spans... And Amazon will be disrupted one day,” he said. “I would love for it to be after I’m dead.”
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
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PRESSURE EXPECTED: The appreciation of the NT dollar reflected expectations that Washington would press Taiwan to boost its currency against the US dollar, dealers said Taiwan’s export-oriented semiconductor and auto part manufacturers are expecting their margins to be affected by large foreign exchange losses as the New Taiwan dollar continued to appreciate sharply against the US dollar yesterday. Among major semiconductor manufacturers, ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光), the world’s largest integrated circuit (IC) packaging and testing services provider, said that whenever the NT dollar rises NT$1 against the greenback, its gross margin is cut by about 1.5 percent. The NT dollar traded as strong as NT$29.59 per US dollar before trimming gains to close NT$0.919, or 2.96 percent, higher at NT$30.145 yesterday in Taipei trading
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