Amazon Just Filed a Patent for Delivery Robots

The new shipping industry is nearly here. Amazon Inc. just applied for a patent on a new package delivery system capable of shipping consumer goods from the primary delivery vehicle to your door via a mini-sized delivery vehicle robot that ferries shipments to final end-point destinations, according to a filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. But we could still get the flying drone deliveries we secretly crave. In the last decade, Amazon and other delivery services have investigated the possibility of employing new technologies to transport packages from warehouses to consumers. The proposals have ranged from driverless vans housing smaller robots to flying drones that ship directly through the air to customer airspace (and then a parachute drop of packages). Electronic delivery robots were assumed to be a cheaper alternative to hiring and supporting humans to perform hard labor.