News:Â online retail giant Amazon has presented a prototype for a service that uses flying robots to deliver packages to customers within half an hour of ordering (+ movie).
The service would be called Amazon Prime Air and would be available to customers living within a ten mile radius of one of Amazon's distribution centres.
The unmanned aerial vehicles are called "octocopters" because they feature eight propellers and Amazon claims they could be implemented as soon as 2015.
A video released by Amazon shows a drone collecting a package inside a plastic container from a conveyor belt at a distribution centre before taking off and delivering it to the customer's doorstep. The flying robots would be directed by GPS to coordinates specified by the customer.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made the announcement yesterday on American investigative news programme 60 Minutes and explained that the technology is already in place, but that the legal issues surrounding such an operation are likely to delay its implementation.
"The hardest challenge in making this happen is going to be demonstrating to the standards of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) that this is a safe thing to do," Bezos told 60 Minutes.
"I don’t want anybody to think this is just around the corner. This is years of additional work from this point," he said, before stating that he hopes it could be made available to customers in four to five years.
"We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015," said Amazon on a webpage dedicated to the project. "We will be ready at that time. One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today."
"The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritise public safety," the company added. "Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards."
During a demonstration, Bezos pointed out that the unmanned vehicle can still fly if one of its rotors suffers a failure. "I know this looks like science fiction; it's not," he said.
Sydney startup Flirtey claimed to have launched "the world's first unmanned aerial vehicle delivery technology" earlier this year, using flying robots to deliver books directly to customers based on the location of their mobile phone.