Technology keeps giving us new challenges and new ways to overcome them. Some technology works better than others, mostly due to great testing and regulations which were used on time to make the devices or services as best as they can be. 

Some things, like calculators, have evolved to the point where they don’t really get things wrong. There are even things such as a Betting Calculator, which can help a bettor even out the odds, a bit. 

Amazon is one of those companies that borders on the bleeding edge, striving to develop new technology and implement it as fast as possible. There are multiple ways in which they plan on doing so but at the moment, the thing of interest is Prime Air. Prime Air is a name for their drone delivery service, which should be able to deliver articles of a certain size and weight. 

Here is more on the topic.

What is Prime Air and How it Came to Be

Prime Air is a delivery service by Amazon which is supposed to use fully autonomous drones to carry packages to people in under 30 minutes. The packages have to be of a certain small size and weigh less than five pounds or 2.26 kilograms.

Being fully autonomous, the drones would not need pilots working from afar, but people would still be monitoring the progress of the drone, should it happen to get into an unexpected situation. The drone is powered by machine learning, of course. 

Some of the hardest challenges that the drones had to overcome were landings, mostly because they would have to land on lawns where there are multiple things that can cause distress and damage. From telephone wires to actual electrical wires, not to mention clotheslines and all sorts of things that can be found on the lawn, the drones would need to utilize their many sensors to relay the data to an AI in real-time, which would then tell them what to do.

When they are met with an unsafe situation, they would not proceed. Human intervention is possible in these situations. This type of machinery works, but not without its caveats and problems, which were reported by the UK branch of Amazon.

What is Wrong With Prime Air?

In 2021, around 100 Amazon Prime Air employees lost their jobs. This is not a sign of the drones becoming autonomous, but rather, a project being completely mismanaged.

The project was mismanaged for the past two years, describing the higher-ups as being detached from reality and making the employees work in organized chaos. 

Other drone delivery services were dropping packages from a distance, while Amazon employees were tasked with making drones drop them from a very short distance. This made the drones heavy, up to 27 kilograms, which then required reclassification to something other than a small drone, making it very difficult from both a legal and engineering standpoint. 

As far as drone delivery services go, Prime Air works but it is absolutely messy at the moment and will hopefully become better with time and when proper people are hired to do the job.