Amazon to trial drone delivery in the UK

Remember that video from late last year that seemed to show Amazon's plans to use unmanned drones to deliver packages to customers that live near distribution centres? It was initially thought to be a bit of an attention grabber leading up to Christmas, but apparently there was some truth to it as the retail giant has now announced that it will be trialling same day drone deliveries in Cambridge, UK.

It's not clear at this stage when Amazon plans to begin trials, though it will be expanding its local research facility to try and hoover up some of that university graduate talent in order to push the technology further. We also know that the project itself is known as Amazon Prime Air and has so far taken on a flight engineer and several research scientists with experience of applying “machine learning” to different situations.

Prime Air is of course though, just one of Amazon's attempts to speed up its delivery to under 24 hours in order to make its services that bit better than the ever increasing competition and a push in many sectors to get people back to buying from the high street. It's previously set up same-day delivery services to local news-agents for collection and has used taxis in the US to further increase delivery speed.

This is also an effort by the firm to push its Prime service, which through a monthly or annual subscription gives people access to streaming movies, along with free delivery and several other features.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Is drone delivery something that you guys would be interested in using if made available nationwide? 

Become a Patron!