Amazon hiring drone flight ops engineer in Cambridge, UK

Nerf gun….

I can see a market for nerf guns retrofitted with EMP pulse generators to knock the Vespas(*) out of the sky

(*): The Vespa is so named as it is the Italian for Wasp

HAhahahahahah. This is going to be a complete mess.

Lets hope they dont base it around the parrot ar drone:

http://samy.pl/skyjack/

or for those without 802.11

http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/how-to-build-a-radiodrone-jammer/34089

or GPS Spoof

http://www.wired.com/2012/07/drone-hijacking/all/

Drone over head, de-auth/jam/spoof, free package for me, all your amazon goddies are miiiine i say.

Awww but come on.. your talking about committing an offence and vandalism, what im talking about is drones dropping me free packages when over my air space.

Glad im in the minority, more free packages for me :)

Really Amazon? Really?

So, Amazon are incompetent at managing to delivery customer orders anyway, especially now they have introduced their own courier service dubbed 'Amazon Logistics'. What makes Amazon think that they can drive innovation and actually make this concept a successful reality? Laughable.

Have you tried *driving* in Cambridge?

If you want to compare delivering by van versus by air in Cambridge you have to consider that for large parts of the day your van is going nowhere fast.

One way you might consider using it would be to have safe routes from your central warehouse to a number of distributed pickup points strategically placed to avoid the traffic.

ie rather than delivering right to the door with the drone, you have a hybrid system where you are keeping your delivery people supplied without them having to return right back to base.

The other consideration is drone deliveries have the advantage of potentially being customer scheduled.

Ie you get a notification your package is ready - then you say you want it delivered in the next ten minutes and you get pinged when the drone is 30 secs from your door. Avoid the whole 'you weren't in' issue.

Again the drone hop could be quite short - from a moving van - the software automatically knows the 'safe routes' and the van just has to intersect one ( the driver is given directions ) and the drone takes off with the van moving.

So to sum up - a network of static and moving locations ( vans ) connected by safe routes and drones - all optimized by software.

Once you think like that - it's not as silly as loads of drones from a big central warehouse over long distances.

Maybe I should submit a patent....

Not against the idea but...

Battery powered drones are only practical in areas very near to a distribution base, which are usually built up areas where drone flights are currently illegal. Computer guided drones are even less likely to get approval for safety reasons.

Then there's the battery life issue - currently drone batteries only last maybe 15-30 minutes, so they will have to keep swapping batteries on return to base.

I think their application will be very limited at first, perhaps useful for deliveries to hard to access areas.

I don't think anyone gets it here.

These will not be drones that you think of when someone says "drones", look at "Unmanned aerial vehicles".

These will be full-sized planes (well, perhaps small ones) under full computer control, just like regular planes, except the pilot will be sitting on a chair back at their "flight centre" somewhere.

The "drones" are stocked full of crates, and sent to some airport somewhere. At said airport, regular truck drivers will transport stock the rest of the way.

The savings come in through: (I'm speculating here) but since they're going to be mostly flying on auto-pilot, you could conceivably get one pilot to drive more than one plane, er, drone. Not sure what the exact pilot requirements are here, but if they're lax compared to regular planes there could be double duty performed here. Not only that, from what I've been able to scrape, UAV pilot licencing requirements are more lax than regular pilots, so I'm guessing Amazon could save a bit on pay packets there too.