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Amazon files patent for flying warehouse
- davelnewton 10y agoThey filed for a blimp w/ a place for storage?
- zitterbewegung 10y agoYou are talking about the company that filed a patent for 1-click ordering. Honestly, its a blimp with a place for storage and the ability to launch drones.
- davelnewton 10y agoHm I forgot about that one-click thing. Still annoys me >:|
- ghusbands 10y agoAmazon are steadfastly driving delivery times down, by whatever means necessary. They seem to be the only company striving so hard, and it's to their credit. The patent appears to be an extension of that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- magoon 10y agoThis scheme could be economical, reliable, and (finally) a great use for airships besides overhead stadium camera angles. The airships, themselves, could even be drones.
- neximo64 10y agoI respect amazon's audaciousness with this idea but I think it might be better to stick to the ground as the drone needs to go somewhere once its done and to go up is probably not optimal.
- zaroth 10y agoI think the theory is that it uses no power while it is coming down heavy. Going back up with no payload is easy. The potential energy stored by the height of the airship is the solution to the battery problem. It might also solve much of the noise and air traffic problem if these drones are basically floating down silently from above, and then with no cargo they can head back up either loudly but instantly or quietly and calmly.
- Slump 10y agoAccording to the patent, the drones would not fly back up to the airship but rather they would fly to collection center on land, be loaded into a smaller ship with other supplies and then flown back to the large airship. Presumably with the energy saved from gliding rather than flying to their delivery destination they'd have more range to make it to collection centers that are more sparse then if they just flew back and forth from the centers themselves.
- nunez 10y agoHoly shit this is literally from Storks
- lotsoflumens 10y agoI should file a patent for the orbiting warehouse ... and the submarine warehouse too.
- bbarn 10y agoI know it's very slippery-slope in nature, but drone deliveries bother me. I think of them being great theft targets, then of course they need to defend themselves, then we've got armed drones delivering packages. This would advance the "theft target" part greatly.
- empath75 10y agoOr, you know, insurance. But sure, let's put missile launchers on them instead.
- ythn 10y agoI foresee anti-theft measures being more like the drone rendering itself useless/calling home if stolen or captured. Also marking the parts with amazon identification so you know they are stolen. It's no different from stealing the mailman's truck when he gets out to make a delivery, and mail trucks don't need "defense" built in.
- Alupis 10y agoPeople aren't talking about stealing the drones - rather, stealing the goods the drone is carrying.
- HNaTTY 10y agoUnless you're assuming an awesome future with net guns fired from pirate drones, downing the Amazon drones and stealing their wares, this is just the same package theft issue that already exists.
- bbarn 10y agoWith the exception that the human factor is removed. I have to imagine the number of teenage kids who'd take an en route drone out of the sky is greater than the number that would attack a UPS driver or steal from someone's door.
- randomdrake 10y agoThe "Detailed Description" of the actual patent[1] reads like wonderful science fiction. It uses the familiar UAV for "unmanned aerial vehicles" and introduces AFC for "aerial fulfillment center." They have visions of the AFCs not only being placed above metropolitan areas where people can simply browse the inventories of them, but actually moving into place in on demand scenarios: "An AFC may navigate to an area based on various positioning factors. For example, a temporal event (e.g., a football game) may be expected to produce a demand for certain types of items (e.g., sporting paraphernalia, food products, etc.). In advance of the event, the items may be delivered to the AFC in a quantity sufficient to satisfy the expected demand and the AFC may navigate to a position such that UAVs deployed from the AFC can safely navigate to the location of the event and deliver the items, thereby satisfying the demand. In some implementations, the AFC may navigate to a lower altitude and provide advertising for the temporal event or for other occasions (e.g., product announcements, product releases, sales)." Very reminiscent of carriers from StarCraft slowly lumbering into position and releasing robotic fleets from their bowels. But they don't stop at just advertising for these "temporal events." Bringing up visions of the omnipresent geisha blimp from Blade Runner, they describe ways in which ads can be displayed around 2,000 feet in the air above cities as well. There's language like "docking bays" and "dirigibles" in a world with shuttles going to and from AFCs, charging and repairing UAVs autonomously. The patent is a long read, as patents tend to be, but definitely fun if you're into this sort of stuff. [1] - http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=9305280.PN.&OS=PN/9305280&RS=PN/9305280 http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...
- empath75 10y agoThe best part of this is they felt like they needed to patent this idea. Tell me, what other company would be crazy or ambitious enough to even attempt this?
- Twirrim 10y agoAmazon files a lot of patents. Most of which never actually end up being used. It's not that they're not viable, it's that sometimes better options are discovered. In no small part it's building up a nuclear arsenal, as it were. With the way patents are being used to attack companies and extort them, having many patents in your arsenal gives others pause for thought as the odds of there not being something you're doing that isn't covered by a patent they hold gets lower and lower all the time.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ghusbands 10y agoAmazon are steadily reducing delivery times, aiming for fewer and fewer numbers of hours, now, rather than days. The patent is clearly a part of that effort. Are there any other companies so dedicated to that goal?
- DrSeuss 10y agoCarrier has arrived.
- stanfordkid 10y agoI really worry about data privacy -- it's trivial for Amazon to capture tons of video of people and use this for a variety of purposes. It's like street view but with a million more cameras that can be positioned on demand. I think we need more policy around our rights to images of ourselves... in particular I think we are reaching a phase in human society where data is an extension of the human self rather than existing as a foreign object. Existing laws and judicial philosophy need to be amended to reflect this fact.
- cookiecaper 10y agoThe pace of technical change in society has greatly outpaced the ability of our legislative and judicial systems to cope with it. While I hate to say it, as the difficulty of passing law is an important protection from an overzealous government, we need to find some way to get these things expedited (and expedited like in real person terms, not legal terms where an expeditious case is one that is finally resolved 5 years later -- many cases stretch on for ~10 years after accounting for appeals, etc., and some even longer). It'd be a really interesting thought experiment to try to revise our legal systems in a way that allows them to match the pace of technical change whilst keeping protections from government overreach in place.
- alttab 10y agoAs long as the core systems that keep the AFC in air don't run on DynamoDB.
- Diederich 10y agoCan you expand on that?
- amelius 10y agoCan we have some laws please for visual sky pollution, before it is too late?
- cylinder 10y agoIdiocracy, coming to America faster than Mike Judge ever anticipated.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoYes, just like we should have decided social media laws in the age of MySpace. /s
- amelius 10y agoOr when tracking ads became a thing.
- diyseguy 10y agoAgree. I don't want these things cluttering up my view of the sky.
- danr4 10y agoThis is gonna be hard to patent troll, but I’m sure they’ll find a way.
- kolbe 10y agoThat's just a diagram of the mother ship from Independence Day! All kidding aside, this looks awesome. I know drone delivery has its concerns, and there will always be naysayers on any new technology, but I'm excited about the ways in which drones can start improving our lives.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoNow I know Bezos is just trolling us. What's next, fantastical steam powered difference engines sorting packages for delivery? :-)
- jpalomaki 10y agoA true cloud storage platform. Reasonably high bandwidth provided by drones carrying 8TB hard drives.
- Tempest1981 10y agoSo should this be patentable? Regardless of whether it's a good idea, is it novel, and non-obvious?
- maverick_iceman 10y agoWhat happened to having at least a working prototype before you can file a patent? Can I patent deep sea warehouses (with pipelines linking them to continents) just because I have the idea?
- jazoom 10y agoIn the USA, it seems all you need is to dream up something.
- palazzone 10y agoI am an LTA Aerospace Mechanical System Specialist and I will just say, what they have set out to accomplish will prove much harder than what Blue Origin has accomplished. Yet they do not know that yet because the LTA industry is a very niche industry and only a few really experts in the field who understand what it really takes to keep these systems alive against our unforgiving mother of nature.