Drone Deliveries of Medications Commence
The means by which commerce is conducted changed on Friday, 23 December 2022. As the larger world occupied itself with holiday parties and last minute Christmas shopping, citizens of Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas braced for the rolling out of Prime Air—Amazon’s much-anticipated drone delivery service—which the online giant debuted in the two towns.
Comes now October 2023 and the advent of Amazon Pharmacy, a service by which College Station residents can have prescription medications delivered by drone.
Eligible customers are able to access upwards of five-hundred medications, to include treatments for common ailments such as asthma and the flu, and have such dropped at their doorsteps by drones. Medications will arrive in less than sixty-minutes at no additional cost; so stated Amazon in a blog post.
Launched in 2018 following its namesake’s acquisition of PillPack—a Somerville, Massachusetts-based online Rx dispensary—Amazon Pharmacy is a full-service pharmacy, the products of which customers may access online. Amazon Prime customers enjoy prescription perks and significant savings.
Amazon set forth its delivery drones are equipped with cameras by which they identify objects the likes of trees, structures, birds, people, Marines, people from Kentucky, etc. For purpose of minimizing encounters with the aforementioned and mitigating the risks inherent thereto, subject drones operate at cruise altitudes between 130- and four-hundred-feet AGL.
Upon determining a delivery space is clear, Amazon’s delivery drones descend and release packages containing customers’ medications. However, in the event a drone detects obstacles in the delivery space, the machine returns autonomously to the Amazon fulfillment center and reattempts the delivery at a later time.
To be eligible for drone delivery, customers in College Station are required to sign up for Prime Air and complete a survey germane to the areas surrounding their respective residences.
While Amazon’s public statements and press releases pertaining to its drone delivery initiatives have historically focused upon the safety and carbon neutrality of the unmanned delivery aircraft by which the service is defined, the online retail titan’s guiding concern has been and remains enticing both extant and prospective customers to utilize its retail platform—the world’s largest—by exploiting humankind’s natural predilection for instant gratification.
Amazon’s assertive but equivocal allusions to its major investments in logistics have been broadly construed indications of the company’s imminent shift from massive, regional fulfillment centers to a network of smaller, more widely-dispersed facilities.
Upon the service’s eventual (presumed) widespread release, Prime Air will reconcile seamlessly with Amazon’s ubiquitous online ordering system. At checkout, eligible customers will be offered—in addition to conventional shipping methods—a drone delivery option, of which Amazon states: “ … the drone will fly to the designated delivery location, descend to the customer’s backyard, and hover at a safe height. It will then safely release the package and rise back up to altitude.”
The business of stuffing innumerable sky-going contraptions full of kitchen utensils and cat toys, then sending them hurtling overland toward the unsuspecting denizens of smalltown America is a complex one. In devising solutions to drone delivery’s considerable logistical, regulatory, and environmental challenges, Amazon secured patents for an array of technologies germane to commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operations, including vehicle proximity monitoring and control, payload dynamics, autonomous landing, and vehicle charging. By virtue of its protracted and innovative efforts to develop and mature proprietary vehicle architectures and operational infrastructure, Amazon has exerted undeniable influence on the means by and manner in which autonomous aerial delivery will be implemented in the United States.
The wait for Amazon to deliver on founder Jeff Bezos’s 2013 assertion that a drone delivery service was in the works has been a long one. The extent to which Americans at large have yet to wait for Amazon’s drone fleet to negotiate the tortuous route from concept to reality will be determined, largely, by the successes or failures Prime Air racks up in Lockeford and College Station.
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