With Amazon already planning to introduce a drone delivery service, the most popular future technology question people are asking is if delivery drones will be the next industrial revolution? Amazon’s drone delivery service would be known as Amazon Prime Air. A customer can order an item on Amazon and then choose the Amazon Prime Air for delivery. Once the order is finished, drones would enter Amazon’s fulfillment center through openings on the exterior of the warehouse. Picking robots would then package the orders to be handed off to the delivery drones. The robots would then place the orders on a conveyor belt for the drones to pick up. Once the item is picked up, the drone exits the fulfillment center and fly to the customer. In order to use the drone delivery service, a customer needs to be located close to one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers. The desired item of purchase also has to be stocked in the fulfillment center and the order must not weigh more than 2.3 kilogram.

Once the drone takes off, flight would be fully autonomous and guided by GPS coordinates, ensuring that there is no need for a human operator. Built in sensors would let drones avoid buildings and other objects. Once a drone is about to land, a customer is prompted via mobile phone to give the drone an ‘all clear’ to land. The ‘all clear’ signifies that a drone can land safely without getting damaged. Customers who opt for drone delivery are required to have a suitable landing space near them.

Amazon Prime Air has been ready to fly since 2015, but the project was delayed due to lack of government regulations needed for the program to take off. Amazon however used this waiting period to improve drone design and functionality. In 2016, Amazon got the break it was waiting for when it tested the drone delivery system in England. The same goes for the U.S. rules made in June, 2016 which now allowed commercial companies to operate drones without lengthy authorization processes.  This move made the Amazon automated drone delivery system feasible and potentially realizable.

Amazon has released certain information regarding what customers should expect from its drone delivery system. One of them is that there are going to be several drone designs, each is designed for use in different environments and the ranges of each design would be different as well as the weight of items it can carry.

Although drone delivery in the U.S would face serious and uncertain regulatory challenges, it is a foreseeable choice of delivery in the near future. Several companies aside Amazon are already experimenting with drone delivery. Drones would no doubt become the next huge technological advancement that would change the landscape of several business operations for good. With major business leaders like Amazon, Google, Intel and Sony investing substantially in drone operations, it is a fact that drone delivery is the next big revolution.