Market news

Amazon unveils its new delivery drone

Amazon has unveiled its new Prime Air delivery drone. The drone is designed as a hexacopter with a shroud that acts as its wings and stabilizers when the drone switches to horizontal flight. The drone is expected to start delivering first packages within several months, reported in Amazon’s blog.

Amazon has been working on drones capable of delivering packages to its customers for several years. The company first announced plans to launch such service all the way back in 2013, and then in 2016, it had made its first successful drone delivery to a customer in the UK. For all these years engineers have designed several various prototypes. At the beginning they used quadcopters, and then presented a hybrid design drone with eight propellers for vertical flight, one pusher propeller and wings for effective horizontal flight.

Amazon executive Jeff Wilke unveiled at the company’s re:MARS conference the new drone, which can also fly vertically and horizontally, but has less sophisticated design. The drone is a hexacopter with a large six-sided shroud. The aerodynamic shape of its surfaces creates the lift and makes the flight run smoothly. A separate vertical stabilizer is installed on the upper part of the drone.

In the middle of the shroud the heart of the drone is located, consisting of a battery, electronic sensors, compartment for carrying packages and camera to evade obstacles. The drone takes off vertically and then tilts to horizontal flight, which is more dynamic. The drone does it by changing thrust between fore and rear propellers. It is interesting that these twin-propellers are not parallel to each other: two fore propellers are tilted backward from the center and two rear propellers, to the contrary, are tilted towards the center.

The drone can deliver packages under 5 pounds (2.27 kg) within a distance of 15 miles (24 km) in less than half an hour. The company is going to start using the new drone to deliver packages to its customers within a matter of months, however it is unclear whether it is planning to deploy a full scale or just a test drone deliver service.

Amazon is competing against Alphabet’s Wing that along with other companies works on drone deliveries of small packages. Wing has already launched the delivery service in Australia and Finland, and recently have become the first drone delivery company in the U.S., where it is going to start delivering packages to its customers. Wing uses a hybrid VTOL drone with 12 propellers and 2 puller propellers for flight in a plane-like mode.

Source: nplus1

Tags: Новости рынка