Amazon Gets Patent for Drones-Based Inventory Management
Amazon Technologies landed a U.S. patent Tuesday that uses drones for more efficient movement of inventory in warehouses. Patent 10,000,284 describes a “collaborative unmanned aerial vehicle for an inventory system.” Modern inventory systems “face significant challenges in responding to requests…
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for inventory items,” and those challenges become “non-trivial” when stock needs to be split between ground floors and upper “mezzanine levels within a large structure,” it said. An inventory system can quickly “dispatch autonomous ground drive units on both the first floor and on the mezzanine to collect the items,” it said. “At the mezzanine, the items can be collected at a staging point and consolidated into a container for transport.” The staging point may double as a “docking station” for a drone, it said. Amazon didn’t comment on commercial implications.