Not exactly Postman Pat! Amazon to use DRONES to deliver

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Not exactly Postman Pat! Amazon to use DRONES to deliver shopping direct to your doorstep

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AT FIRST sight, this has all the hallmarks of a very late April Fool's joke, but online retail giant Amazon today revealed it is developing drones to deliver customers’ goods direct to their doorsteps via a new PrimeAir service.

As Cyber Monday sees the busiest online shopping day of the year, the company announced the new Octocopters could be in use within five years.

Speaking on CBS television's 60 Minutes, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said although the Prime Air project looked like science fiction, it wasn't.

He said: "We can do half-hour delivery... and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds (2.3kg), which covers 86 per cent of the items that we deliver.

"From a technology point of view, we'll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place.”

He explained the Octocopters would be able to deliver within a ten mile radius of an Amazon warehouse and would use GPS to find their way.

He said: "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 neighbourhood’.

Amazon has released an astonishing video of what an Octocopter would look like in action - picking up a package from one of its warehouses and delivering it to a customer.

The company is now awaiting the go ahead from the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Although the project is being developed for the American market, plans could be rolled out to Europe when civilian airspace is opened up to drones in 2016.

Speaking to the BBC Dr Darren Ansell, an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) from the University of Central Lancashire said: "The UAVs do not currently have the awareness of their environment to be able to avoid flying into people.

"To deliver goods to people's homes for example in residential areas, the UAVs must overfly densely populated towns and cities, something that today's regulations prevent.

"Other things to consider are security of the goods during the transit. With no one to guard them the aircraft and package could be captured and stolen," he said.

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