Amazon’s latest wacky idea: mobile drone stations on trains, boats, and vans

Amazon’s engineers are cooking up some wild ideas on how to integrate drones into major cities. In the latest patent filing, the e-commerce giant shows how special facilities connected to trains, boats, and vans could be used as storage space and repair stations for drones.
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The drones would be moved to areas of anticipated demand and fly out from the mobile hub.

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See Also: Drones might inspect your house when making deliveries

“The intermodal vehicles may be coupled to locomotives, container ships, road tractors or other vehicles, and equipped with systems for loading one or more items onto the aerial vehicle, and for launching or retrieving the aerial vehicle while the intermodal vehicles are in motion.”

“Additionally, intermodal vehicles may be loaded with replacement parts and/or inspection equipment, and configured to conduct repairs, servicing operations or inspections on aerial vehicles within the intermodal vehicles, while the intermodal vehicles are in motion,” said Amazon in the filing.

Having mobile storage and repair units may help Amazon deploy thousands of drones without having to spend a large amount on warehouse space inside major cities. We could even see Amazon use the transport for both supply and storage, with the drone taking items from the same truck or train.

Amazon clearly going all-in on drones

It should be noted Amazon is filing quite a lot of patents to do with drone travel and storage. It patented a zeppelin concept that had drones delivering parcels from above and mini zeppelins supplying the mother. A few weeks later it filed a vertical warehouse in the shape of a beehive.

Even with all these filings, Amazon is still a few years away from any serious drone deployment. The company has conducted a few tests in the U.K., but has yet to integrate drones into any of its Prime services and the laws on drone use are still in flux across most of the world.

ARM: One trillion IoT devices by 2035, $5 trillion in market value

The Internet of Things will be the next stage in the computer revolution, this time focused on the “type of data we collect,” according to a whitepaper from ARM.

The British semiconductor firm, recently acquired by SoftBank for $32 billion, estimates that one trillion IoT devices will be built between 2017 to 2035, adding $5 trillion to the global GDP.

See Also: SoftBank wants autonomous shuttle on public roads by 2020

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The estimate follows a comment by Masayoshi Son, the chairman and CEO of SoftBank, who said in the next twenty years that one trillion IoT devices are coming. He predicted that the influx of IoT devices will “redefine all industries.”

ARM sees the advantages of IoT devices in all business areas: revenue, profit, and productivity. In the paper, it sees a five percent potential output boost in food production and distribution, manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and healthcare and social assistance.

IoT is expected to become even more valuable as the cost of devices and components falls dramatically, similar to the decline in processors and other computer costs leading to the proliferation of PCs at home and in the workplace.

A whole new world

With the introduction of AI and machine learning, enterprises will be able to embark on projects never thought possible before. These could include hourly diagnosis of how to treat a specific type of cancer or a self-driving network that does not require traffic lights, reducing congestion.

$1 trillion will be spent on IoT modules and data services, according to ARM, and $750 billion will be spent between 2017 and 2035 on IoT connectivity modules.

Gartner, a research firm, predicts 20 billion IoT devices will be in use by 2020, another research firm Juniper expects 38 billion. Between 2025 and 2035, the industry is expected to start to deploy IoT devices across all channels.

ARM is seen as one of the key players in the deployment of IoT, especially now that it is owned by SoftBank, a company that is betting big on emerging technologies.

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