Despite the great limitations that all large companies have today when developing their autonomous drone programs, it lies precisely in something as simple as lack of legislation regulating its use, especially the way these drones should work when they fly over cities, between buildings, over a crowd ... At this point, remember that not only are companies such as Amazon that work in this kind of program, but we found others such as Google, DHL ...
At the moment, it seems, the only solution that these companies have found is to reach a collaboration agreement with different cities so that, in very specific areas and for a set time, companies can test your development programs and thus be able to find faults or solutions to problems that, in principle, they had not faced. Undoubtedly a very interesting way to continue developing your autonomous drones so that, when the time comes and with legislation that regulates their use, they can get them to the market in the shortest possible time.
The latest Amazon patent tells us that customers will be able to order their drones
This time I want us to talk about something as interesting as several of the patents that we found, which, at times, can be as interesting as the one that Amazon engineers have just presented. In the patent that has just been presented we find that, apparently, Amazon has been working to ensure that their drones, when the time comes, can understand various types of gestures when completing their deliveries.
As you can read in the patent US9459620:
Human gestures can include visible gestures, audible gestures, and other gestures capable of being recognized by the unmanned vehicle.
Personally, I have to admit that it is a unique way of ensuring that, when the time comes, either an operator or directly the customer who must receive a merchandise can make some kind of indication for the drone to land in an area and deliver the package. A very interesting action that seems to me an advance, for example, to the way in which, today, we can already operate certain drones such as DJI Spark.
Thanks to this software, the drone will be able to recognize the client when connecting to any of their mobile devices
If we go into a certain sense in what this patent can mean, basically what they want to achieve to develop in Amazon is new software for their drones so that the problem that was planned at the time of one of these drones deliver a package, for example, in a block of flats, will you do it on your roof? At the entrance of the block? Just drop it and go even though you're not home? What if we are not at home and it is stolen?
All this seems to have resulted in the creation of software in such a way that the drone will only leave its package when the user tells it to move away from or approach a certain area through gestures to deposit the merchandise that it carries with it. security. Apparently and, as it appears in the patent, the drone could even reach recognize a series of spoken commands or commands.
To be able to interpret these commands, the drone must be permanently connected to a database in the cloud. Another point to keep in mind is that the drone will also have the ability to connect to user devices, something that, as appears in the patent, can be used to initiate a visual identification sequence with which to ensure that the package is going to be delivered to the correct customer.