Flying Robots and Birds

Why Amazon Dreams of Flying Warehouses

By Jeremy Hsu | December 31, 2016 

A delivery drone prototype operated by Amazon Prime Air.

Amazon gets to play full-time Santa Claus by delivering almost any imaginable item to customers around the world. But the tech giant does not have a magical sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to carry out its delivery orders. Instead, a recent Amazon patent has revealed the breathtaking idea of using giant airships as flying warehouses that could deploy swarms of delivery drones to customers below.

Many patent filings related to new technology often indulge in fantastical flights of fancy. But it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate some of the truly wilder scenarios being imagined within this Amazon patent filing. One scene envisions human or robot workers going to work busily sorting packages aboard airships hovering 45,000 feet above major cities. Another scene imagines the airship’s kitchen whipping up hot or cold food orders that would be loaded onto delivery drones for delivery within minutes.

A third scene anticipates swarms of delivery drones dropping off orders of food or t-shirts to people attending concerts or sports games. Amazon’s patent filing even considers how the airships could fly at much lower altitudes to act as giant billboards or megaphones that advertise and sell items directly to the crowds below.

There is a method to the madness. Amazon currently aims to attract customers with the promise of getting almost anything—clothing, electronics and groceries—delivered within days or even hours. It is currently racing against Google and delivery drone startups such as Flirtey to become the go-to service for customers who expect speedy deliveries of their purchases. The Amazon patent idea for an “airborne fulfillment center” may never become reality, but it speaks to the company’s ambition to enable an “instant gratification” world for customers.

At its heart, Amazon’s idea for flying warehouses aims to solve two problems. First, a mobile warehouse flying high above cities would theoretically enable Amazon to move its packages and products even closer to customers’ homes and businesses and shorten the time needed for last-mile deliveries. The company could even strategically move certain flying warehouses to different locations depending on temporary demand (such as crowds gathering at stadiums for sporting events or concerts).

Second, the flying warehouse scheme tries to tackle the range problem for delivery drones. The small delivery drones being tested by Amazon have fairly limited range of approximately 10 miles (or 20 miles roundtrip). That poses a challenge for Amazon’s Prime Air service, which recently began its first deliveries near Cambridge, UK with the promise of delivering packages within 30 minutes.

Amazon Prime Air’s First Customer Delivery

By acting as flying motherships, the lighter-than-air airships could could better enable delivery drones to fulfill that half-hour promise. Normally, delivery drones must use their own battery power starting from the time they take off with a package until they reach the delivery location and then return home. That battery power necessarily limits their delivery range.

By comparison, Amazon’s patent filing envisions the delivery drones simply gliding down from their motherships and relying mostly on gravity instead of their own power. The power savings combined with the extended range provided by the mobile airships could theoretically go a long way toward speedier deliveries. The patent states:

This speed of delivery provides near instant gratification to users for item purchases and greatly increases the breadth of items that can be delivered. For example, perishable items or even prepared meals can be delivered in a timely fashion to a user.

The small delivery drones would not have to struggle under their own power to return to their motherships hovering at eye-watering heights of 45,000 feet. Instead, Amazon’s patent filing suggests that smaller airships could act as “shuttles” to carry the delivery drones back up to the mothership. Such shuttle airships could also resupply the flying warehouses with new inventory, supplies, fuel and human or robot workers.

Amazon’s patent filing spends much of its time talking about using the airships as flying advertising. Using lighter-than-air aircraft such as blimps for advertising is certainly nothing new. But Amazon’s idea takes this all one step farther because the airship advertising would be dangling the possibility of getting that popular new shoe or hot food delivery within minutes of seeing it being advertised. The patent filing even imagines the airship’s advertising display updating the quantity count of certain items as they sell out.

There is a very long way to go before Amazon’s flying warehouses could ever become remotely feasible. For one thing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to figure out a scheme that would allow swarms of delivery drones to operate safely in the skies above densely populated cities. The FAA currently bans any drone from flying within a certain range of the crowded sporting events or concerts. And even if the airships would theoretically fly above the normal operating altitudes of commercial airline flights, it’s less clear how that airspace would be kept safe if dozens of delivery drones were dropping down from the motherships toward the ground at any given moment.

This is only one of several wild Amazon patents related to drones to have surfaced recently. But if you one day see Amazon’s airships flying low overhead and advertising a trip aboard a SpaceX rocket to the Mars colonies, you might want to pinch yourself and check that you’re not having a dream based on a recent viewing of the 1982 science fiction film “Blade Runner.”

New Flying Robots Take Cues From Airborne Animals

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | December 16, 2016

From navigating turbulence, to sleeping midflight, to soaring without a sound, animals' flight adaptations are helping scientists design better flying robots.

Airborne drones and the animals they mimic are featured in 18 new studies published online Dec. 15 in the journal Interface Focus. This special issue is intended "to inspire development of new aerial robots and to show the current status of animal flight studies," said the issue's editor, David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University in California.

Though humans have been building flying machines since the 18th century, these new studies revealed that there is still much to be learned from looking closely at how birds, insects and bats take flight, keep themselves aloft and maneuver to safe landings. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

Flying drones are rapidly becoming a common sight worldwide. They are used to photograph glorious vistas from above, snap selfies and even deliver packages, as online retail giant Amazon completed its first commercial delivery by drone in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, on Dec. 7, the BBC reported.

But improving how these robots fly isn't easy, experts said. Fortunately, there are plenty of flying animals that scientists can turn to for inspiration. About 10,000 species of birds; 4,000 species of bats; and well over 1 million insect species have evolved over millions of years to spread their wings and take to the air, and most of these species' flight adaptations haven't been studied at all, Lentink told Live Science.

"Most people think that since we know how to design airplanes, we know all there is to know about flight," Lentink said. But once humans could successfully design planes and rockets, they stopped looking as closely at flying animals as they had in the past, he added.

Now, however, growing demand for small, maneuverable flying robots that can perform a variety of tasks has sparked a scientific "renaissance" and is driving researchers to investigate many open questions about animal aerodynamics and biology, Lentink said.

For example, how are owls able to fly so silently? One team of scientists explored adaptations in owls' wings that could muffle noise, finding that the animals' large wing size and the wings' shape, texture and strategically placed feather fringes all work together to help owls glide soundlessly.

Another group of researchers wondered how frigate birds — a type of seabird that can fly without stopping for days at a time — could sleep "on the wing" during long migrations. The scientists collected the first recordings of in-flight brain activity for these birds, discovering that the animals were able to "micro nap" to rest both brain hemispheres at the same time.

Some scientists puzzled over how fruit flies were able to stay aloft even if their wings were damaged, learning that the insects compensated for missing pieces in wing membranes by adjusting their wing and body movements, enabling the bugs to fly even if half a wing had been lost.

Other studies described new robot designs that can plunge into watery depths from midair, flap their way through buffeting winds or bend their wings like a bird, for better control.

Silent flight, energy conservation and renewal, adapting to turbulent conditions, and the ability to self-correct for wing damage are all features that could significantly improve current models of flying drones, Lentink told Live Science.

"They need to become more silent," Lentink said of drones. "They need to be more efficient, and they need to fly longer. There's a lot of engineering that still needs to happen. The fact that the first steps are being made right now is really exciting and shows that there is a great future in this."

Resume : My first article talks about Amazon and its delivery time whixh they are triying to minimize more and more over the years. To manage this achievement, they want to promote the drone utilisation, permeting them to deliver packages in less then one day or within hours. For this, they have a main idea, as I said the flying drones. They want put a warehouse floating in the air and drones would deliver the packages to the aera below. The increase of the speed could now let place to cold food delivery from amazon within minutes. For now, the FAA, the federal aviation administration, is banning all flying drones in the public place, and its a major brake to this technologie.

And in my second article, it speaks about the way scientists inspire the flight of animals and  How do they do to build better flying robots? They look to the natural world for inspiration, investigating the adaptations that allow winged animals to efficiently navigate through the air, even under difficult conditions.

Today's aerial drones are more sophisticated than ever, and will likely continue to improve in performance as scientists uncover more of the secrets to insects', bats' and birds' flying success.