Amazon Lands US Patent for Drones-Based Inventory Management System

Though much of the focus of Amazon’s drone development has been on the Amazon Prime Air initiative and its ultimate promise of delivering packages to customers in 30 minutes or less, Amazon Technologies landed a U.S. patent Tuesday that uses drones for the more efficient movement of inventory within the four walls of the warehouse. The patent (10,000,284) describes a “collaborative unmanned aerial vehicle for an inventory system” and was based on a June 2015 application. Modern inventory systems “face significant challenges in responding to requests for inventory items,” and those challenges become “non-trivial” with the growth of those systems, especially when stock needs to be split between ground floors and upper “mezzanine levels within a large structure,” it says. “Suppose that” Alice, an inventory management “agent,” needs to fill an order for items “on both the first floor and on the mezzanine,” it says. “To accomplish the formerly laborious task of obtaining all of these items, Alice can place a request for the items with an inventory system,” which can quickly “dispatch autonomous ground drive units on both the first floor and on the mezzanine to collect the items,” it says. “At the mezzanine, the items can be collected at a staging point and consolidated into a container for transport.” The staging point may double as a “docking station” for a drone, which can “subsequently lift the container and transport the items to a staging point at the first floor, where all of the items for the order can be consolidated and provided to Alice for shipping,” it says. Amazon didn’t comment Tuesday on the invention's commercial implications.