Amazon Picks Calif. Town for Launching Drone Delivery Service

After nearly a decade in the works, Amazon is planning to launch its drone delivery service this year with customers in Lockeford, California, among the first to receive Prime Air deliveries, Amazon blogged Monday. The drone program is a combined effort of “hundreds of scientists, engineers, aerospace professionals, and futurists,” it said.

Amazon is working with the FAA and local officials in Lockeford to obtain permission to do the deliveries, it said. It will "continue with that collaboration into the future,” it said.

Feedback from Lockeford residents about drone delivery to their backyards will help Amazon scale the service to meet the needs of "customers everywhere," it said. Town residents will be able to sign up for free drone delivery on thousands of everyday items, Amazon said. The launch will add an "innovation milestone” to the town’s aviation history: Aviation pioneer Weldon Cooke, a former resident, built and flew planes in the early 1900s, Amazon said.

Among the challenges in developing a drone delivery service are bringing it to market cost-effectively, at scale and with delivery times under an hour, Amazon said. “It’s relatively easy to use existing technology to fly a light payload a short distance that’s within your line of sight, but it’s a very different challenge to build a network that can deliver to customers across large communities,” it said. The futuristic technology “could one day become just as common as seeing an Amazon delivery van pull up outside your house,” it said.

Prime Air drones are battery-powered and autonomous, blogged Heidi Schubert, Prime Air senior software engineer, in April. To fly safely, the drones need “ground station support,” said Schubert, saying Prime Air builds a map of the area, then uses it to plan a “detailed route that helps the drone get to its destination safely.”

Drones are becoming more popular in the logistics industry, but “not all drone systems are equal,” said Amazon; most can’t sense and avoid other aircraft and obstacles. Those without the ability to avoid objects require visual observers along the route of every flight, it said. That type of drone can be deployed quickly, but it limits delivery operations to a small radius, Amazon said.

Amazon’s “sense-and-avoid system” will enable operations without visual observers, allowing the drone to operate at larger distances “while safely and reliably avoiding other aircraft, people, pets, and obstacles," the company said.

Amazon designed its sense-and-avoid system for two main scenarios: to be safe when in transit, and to be safe when approaching the ground, it said. When flying to the delivery location, the drones need to be able to identify static and moving obstacles, and Amazon’s algorithms use various technologies for object detection. The drone can identify a static object in its path, like a chimney, and it can also detect moving objects on the horizon, “like other aircraft, even when it’s hard for people to see them.”

When obstacles are identified, Amazon’s drone will automatically change course to safely avoid them, the company said. As the drone descends to deliver a package into a customer’s backyard, it ensures there’s a small area around the delivery location that’s clear of any people, animals or obstacles before touchdown, the company said. Prime Air has designed, built and tested more than two dozen drone prototypes, "which we're excited to now use to make customer deliveries in real-world environments.”

Walmart announced last month it's scaling its drone service (see 2205260022) to 34 sites by the end of 2023. It plans to extend delivery to customers in Arkansas, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Virginia and Utah this year. Walmart drone drop-offs will have a $3.99 delivery fee.