Amazon Negotiating 20 Boeing 767s Lease to Bypass Fedex, etc.

Amazon.com is negotiating to lease 20 Boeing 767 jets for its own air-delivery service, cargo-industry executives have told The Seattle Times.

The online retail giant wants to build out its own cargo operations to avoid delays from carriers such as United Parcel Service, which have struggled to keep up with the rapid growth of e-commerce.

“Amazon is pretty fed up with the third-party carriers being a bottleneck to their growth,” Robert W. Baird & Co. analyst Colin Sebastian said.

That has led Amazon to consider handling more of its own delivery. A senior aircraft-leasing company executive familiar with Amazon’s plans said the company has approached several cargo-aircraft lessors to line up the planes. The company has had talks with Air Transport Services Group (ATSG), Atlas Air and Kalitta Air, according to sources, though Kalitta Chief Executive Connie Kalitta denied he has talked with Amazon.

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Even During the Robopocalypse, the Brits Love Their Tubes

Drones flown by Amazon aren't the only way we could be getting our parcels delivered in the near future. UK firm Mole Solutions is exploring the possibility of using small robot trains running on underground tracks to manage deliveries, and it's just received funding from the British government to help test the viability of the proposal.

The system Mole Solutions wants to put in place uses the same maglev technology adopted by Japan's super-fast Shinkansen train. In a maglev-powered system, the natural repelling forces of electromagnets are used to keep the carriage hovering slightly above the track, thus cutting down on friction and increasing speed.

There's plenty to recommend the idea: no deliveries held up by traffic congestion and no need to wait for drivers to become available before you can get your hands on the latest Blu-ray boxset. Mole Solutions says the small tunnels could be installed alongside existing transport infrastructure and create a system that ran 24 hours a day.

The steel carriages would run down concrete tubes measuring between 1.3 m (4.27 ft) and 2.4 m (7.87 ft), while the loading and unloading would also be handled automatically. Unloaded pallets would be stored in secure, temperature-controlled units at specified depots – the box wouldn't trundle straight up to your front door (at least not yet).

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Amazon Given Permission by FAA to Test new Delivery Drone

Amazon has won approval from U.S. federal regulators to test a delivery drone outdoors, less than a month after the e-commerce powerhouse blasted regulators for being slow to approve commercial drone testing.

The Federal Aviation Administration had earlier given the green light to an Amazon prototype drone in March, but the company told U.S. lawmakers less than a week later that the prototype had already become obsolete while it waited more than six months for the agency's permission.

The FAA granted Amazon's request to test delivery drones in a letter dated Wednesday, posted on the agency's website.

Amazon must keep flights at an altitude of no more than 400 feet (120 meters) and no faster than 100 miles per hour (160 km per hour), according to the letter.

Seattle-based Amazon.com has been pursuing its goal of sending packages to customers by air, using small, self-piloted aircraft, even as it faces public concern about safety and privacy.

The company wants to use drones to deliver packages to its customers over distances of 10 miles (16 km) or more, which would require drones to travel autonomously while equipped with technology to avoid collisions with other aircraft.

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SaviOne: Hello! I'm Ready to Deliver....Hotels to the Robopocalypse

And the crowd goes frakin wild with their introduction.  :)

oh and Popular Science has a profile on the SaviOne.  Let's hope the PS/PM curse doesn't kill it.

Amazon Receives Patent for Mobile Manufacturing & Delivery

There is little doubt that some of the world’s largest corporations are investigating 3D printing as a means to both make and save money across the board. Amazon, for example, has slowly been inching its way into the space, partnering with several key companies, including Mixee Labs, to offer customizable 3D printed products to their customers.

As the world’s leading ecommerce provider, Amazon seems to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to selling us anything from printer paper to giant $1 million robots. Thus far, it appears as if the company’s decision to enter the 3D printing space has paid off, as they continue to expand the program in both scale and scope.

If you know much about Amazon, then you know that they obsess with getting products to consumers as fast as physically possible. In fact, they have recently launched One-Hour Delivery in Manhattan, and is pushing for delivery via drones. Usually though, the faster a product is shipped, the more money it will cost the company that is shipping it, and ultimately this comes back to the consumer. For example, Amazon needs to stock literally millions of products at warehouse hubs as close to their customers as possible. Warehouse space is not cheap, especially when considering the millions of square feet needed by a company like Amazon.

What if Amazon could avoid same of these storage costs and get items to users even faster with the use of new, rapidly advancing technologies like 3D printing? Well, that’s just what they are looking into.

Late last week United States Patent and Trademark Office published a patent filing by Amazon Technologies, Inc. which outlines a method of 3D printing on-demand within mobile manufacturing hubs. According to Amazon, such a setup could save the company time and money on several fronts.

The multiplicity of items offered may require the electronic marketplace owner/operator to maintain a large inventory requiring sufficient space to store the inventory,” states the filing. “An electronic marketplace may also face the challenge of time delays related to the process of finding the selected item among a large inventory. Increased space to store additional inventory may raise costs for the electronic marketplace. Additionally, time delays between receiving an order and shipping the item to the customer may reduce customer satisfaction and affect revenues generated. Accordingly, an electronic marketplace may find it desirable to decrease the amount of warehouse or inventory storage space needed, to reduce the amount of time consumed between receiving an order and delivering the item to the customer, or both.”

By utilizing ‘mobile manufacturing apparatuses Amazon would be able to send an STL file to a mobile unit that’s closest to a customer, providing it with instructions to print out an item which was ordered. When the item has been completed, it could then be within miles of the customer who ordered it and quickly delivered or picked up.

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Alibaba Testing Robopocalyptic Drone Delivery Service in Beijing, Shanghai & Guangzhou

In a move possibly meant to catch up with foreign counterparts such as Amazon, Alibaba Group’s Taobao — the largest online-shopping website in China — has tested using drones to deliver goods.

The company is offering the trial service, which is free of charge, from Wednesday to Friday to 450 Taobao buyers of ginger black tea, costing 49 yuan ($7.80) per box, according to Alibaba’s corporate news site Alizila.

The trial took place in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the three largest cities in mainland China, while the drones were provided by Shanghai YTO Express Logistics Co., Alibaba’s Alizila said.

The first box of ginger tea was delivered by a drone in Beijing on Wednesday, with the course navigation pre-set on the drone’s GPS. It took off from a branch of the express company in a Beijing suburb and buzzed the city before arriving at its destination, a video on the Alizila site showed.

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Is Drone Package Delivery Economically Feasible?

Just over one year ago, Amazon announced that it is developing a drone delivery service – Prime Air – in a bid to get packages into customers’ hands within 30 minutes. How feasible is this from a cost perspective? Kiva Systems co-founder indicates drone delivery could cost as low as 20 cents/package.

In the early summer I wrote an article about the economics of Amazon’s drones where I highlighted the cost of logistics to Amazon and some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the likely costs of drone delivery. In the article I indicated that Amazon would require pilots for their drones, especially in the early years of operation, and it seems far-fetched that we will have fully autonomous delivery drones in our cities within the next ten years or so without some sort of human oversight. Backing up my calculations, a recent job advert by Amazon indicates that they are looking for drone pilots, whilst similar jobs attract annual salaries of approximately $100,000 per year.

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Amazon Hiring Engineers for Amazon Prime Air (their robopocalyptic drone devliery system) in the UK

Amazon is looking to recruit British employees to join its Prime Air unmanned air vehicle delivery service project, which until now was largely centred out of its Seattle headquarters.

The company’s job site lists vacancies for a flight operations engineer, project manager, software development engineer and senior research scientist, all to work for the Prime Air initiative and to be based at Amazon’s Cambridge, UK facility.

“We’re working on the future,” the job vacancies state. “If you are seeking an environment where you can drive innovation, if you want to apply state-of-the-art technologies to solve extreme-scale real world problems, if you want the satisfaction of providing visible benefit to end-users in an iterative fast-paced environment, this is your opportunity.”

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Robopocalypse in Germany: DHL Experimenting With Delivery by Drone

German postal service DHL Parcel is to begin testing the delivery of supplies using its Parcelcopter unmanned air vehicle, marking the first operation of a UAV in European airspace beyond line of sight.

The company – owned by Deutsche Post – first flew the vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) Parcelcopter in December 2013, when it travelled across the river Rhine in Bonn.

DHL has been working alongside the institute of flight system dynamics at RWTH Aachen University and VTOL UAV manufacturer Microdrones, which derived the Parcelcopter from its md4-1000 system.

A restricted flight area for the UAV has been established by the German ministry of transport and digital infrastructure in coordination with Deutsche Flugsicherung – the company in charge of air traffic control in the country. This flightpath covers some 6.5nm (12km) of the North Sea from the city of Norden to the island of Juist.

The route will enable the team to test the UAV under harsh conditions. The testing is due to take place over “several months”, and each individual flight will be registered, according to the team.

The carbonfibre Parcelcopter can reach speeds of 35kt (65km/h) while 160ft above sea level. It will be used to deliver medication and urgent supplies to residents of the island during the test phase.

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Google Embraces the Robopocalypse With Delivery by Drone

Google is continuing its journey into the world of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), as it introduces a parcel-delivery UAV prototype developed under its two-year Project Wing effort.

The technology company is developing the concept through its Google X research division, and the announcement follows on from the company’s April 2014 acquisition of Titan Aerospace – a high-altitude, long endurance (HALE) solar-powered UAV manufacturer.

“Throughout history there have been a series of innovations that have each taken a huge chunk out of the friction of moving things around,” says Google X Moonshots captain Astro Teller in a promotional video posted on 28 August. “Project Wing aspires to take another big chunk of the remaining friction out of moving things around the world.”

Testing took place in Australia as recently as two weeks ago, during which first aid kits and food were delivered to Australian farmers.

In the video the fixed-wing prototype (pictured above) is shown to make a controlled drop of the parcel from a height using a tether, and so far Google says the development has “resulted in a reliable system that can do autonomous delivery”.

Google admits it is “years from a product”, but is confident in this first prototype, which it describes as more akin to a driverless car – which Google is also researching – than to other remote-controlled UAVs.

Dave Vos, the founder of Athena Technologies - a company that developed control software for UAVs and was purchased by Rockwell Collins in 2008 - has been named as lead on the project. The next stage of Project Wing will see Google X working to prove a UAV can quickly and safely deliver items.

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Amazon Applies for FAA Drone Exemption to Start Testing Amazon Prime Air

Amazon.com has asked the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration permission to test drones outdoors for use in its Prime Air package delivery service.

In the run up to launching the service, which aims to deliver packages in 30 minutes or less, the online retailer is developing aerial vehicles that travel over 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour, and will carry 5pound (2.3 kilogram) payloads, which account for 86 percent of the products sold on Amazon.

U.S. regulations currently allow non-commercial, hobbyist uses of model aircraft under certain conditions, but the FAA has been exploring giving exemptions to seven aerial photo and video production companies for filming movies, ahead of finalizing rules for the integration of commercial unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the national airspace.

Amazon has been currently experimenting with Prime Air inside its research and development lab in Seattle, the company said in its exemption application to the FAA. As it is a commercial enterprise, it has been limited to conducting test flights indoors or in other countries, it said. The company said it would prefer to keep the focus, jobs and investment for the program in the U.S.

The retailer said that granting its request for exemption would do no more than allow Amazon to do what thousands of hobbyists and manufacturers of model aircraft already do every day. It said it will abide by much stronger safety measures than currently required for these groups by FAA policies and regulations.

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Amazon Will NOT Deliver the Robopocalypse This Year

The Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon.

The revelation was buried in a FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft."

The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. A federal judge ruled in March, however, that the FAA enacted the regulations illegally because it did not take public input before adopting the rules, which is a violation of federal law. Flight regulators have appealed the decision, maintaining that commercial applications are still barred.

The agency has promised that it would revisit the commercial application of small drones later this year, with potential new rules in place perhaps by the end of 2015. But for now, the agency is taking a hard line against the commercial use of drones, and it's unclear whether that policy would change.

Brendan Schulman, the New York lawyer who convinced a federal judge to declare that the FAA is illegally enforcing a commercial ban on drones, lashed out at the FAA's latest attack on them. "It's a purported new legal basis telling people to stop operating model aircraft for business purposes," he said.

In Monday's announcement, published in the Federal Register, the FAA named Amazon's December proposal as an example of what is barred under regulations that allow the use of drones for hobby and recreational purposes. The agency did not mention Amazon Prime Air by name, but it didn't have to.

Under a graphic that says what is barred, the FAA mentioned the "Delivering of packages to people for a fee." A footnote added, "If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose."

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Amazon Prime Air: The Robopocalypse is HERE for Mail and Delivery People

Matternet: Robopocalypse has Come for the US Mail-person