Amazon testing delivery drones in B.C. skies
Spurned by U.S. regulators, Amazon.com has turned to the one country where flying delivery robots are still welcome: Canada.
The online retail giant is testing its latest prototypes for package carrying drones at a top secret site in British Columbia, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed on Monday.
“We are rapidly experimenting and iterating on Amazon Prime Air, including outdoors at a rural test site in Canada,” wrote Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish in an email to the National Post.
First announced in 2013, Prime Air is a proposed arm of Amazon. com that would use autonomous drones travelling as fast as 80 km/h to rush packages to urban locations around the world.
“One day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today,” wrote the company in a petition to U.S. regulators.
Located a mere 600 metres from the U.S. border, the Canadian testing grounds fulfil a lingering threat by Amazon to take its drone research abroad unless U.S. regulators speed up their glacial approval process for unmanned aircraft.
Earlier this month, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared one of Amazon’s drones for testing, only to be informed that the six-month approval process had taken so long that the vehicle was already obsolete.
“We’ve moved on to more advanced designs that we already are testing abroad,” wrote Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice-president for Global Public Policy, in a biting submission to the U.S. Senate last week.
Guarded by a small contingent of plainclothes security guards, the B.C. testing site is being used to test autonomous drones capable of carrying a five-pound package as far as 14 kilometres. The technology will one day be used “to deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or less,” said Kish.
Although Transport Canada requires that the test drones remain less than 90 metres from the ground and within sight of their operators, Canada’s open-armed policy for flying robots enabled the Amazon team to win approval for the tests in a matter of weeks.
South of the border, meanwhile, it will be another two years until comprehensive drone legislation takes effect. While the drones have also been allowed to take to the air in the U.K. and Israel, on U.S. soil they remain restricted to indoor testing at a Seattle-area facility.
Amazon’s drone development is being overseen by a crack team of roboticists, aerospace engineers and NASA alumni.
After being shuttled to the B.C. site from their homes in Seattle, the team members are overseeing trials to gauge the ability of Amazon drones to steer clear of unexpected obstacles and function safely in the event that their remote connection is lost. The Guardian reported witnessing the test of a “hybrid drone that can take off and land vertically.”