It looks like Alphabet Inc.’s budding Wing drone delivery operation will soon have some serious competition.

At its re:MARS emerging technology event today, Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a homegrown courier drone that it plans on using to fly packages to consumers’ homes via its Prime Air operation. It’s the latest of some two dozen drones the company has designed.

Jeff Wilke (pictured), the chief executive of Amazon’s core Worldwide Consumer business, said deliveries will start in a matter of months. Wilke didn’t say where the service will become accessible or for how many users, though he said Amazon is working with a couple of governmental agencies on arrangements needed for a commercial service.

But Wilke did go into quite a bit of detail about the aircraft’s design. The yet-unnamed drone shares little resemble to the earlier models Amazon has used in its aerial delivery program. The fully electrically powered vehicle consists of a navigation system and six rotors embedded in a hexagonal frame referred to by the company as the “shroud.” It takes off like a helicopter, with the shroud oriented horizontally, and tilts sideways after it achieves a certain altitude to fly like a plane.

Though a drastic departure from previous models, Amazon’s aircraft is relatively simple as far as the design is concerned. The company has equipped the aircraft with just four movable flight control surfaces for steering and further cut down the number of components by having the shroud double as the wings. Yet even so, the drone is highly maneuverable: It can move with six degrees of freedom to navigate around different kinds of obstacles.

The aircraft can cover as many as 15 miles per trip and carry packages weighing up to five pounds of a size that covers 80% of Amazon’s shipments. That’s expected to result in delivery times of less than 30 minutes. The drone is piloted by the rectangular navigation system at the center of the shroud. It’s a highly specialized computer Amazon has developed in-house that’s fed information by visual, thermal and ultrasonic sensors scattered throughout the aircraft. 

The system relies on machine learning software to turn the raw flight data into navigation instructions. Amazon’s algorithms can spot other flying objects such as planes and maneuver around them, as well as avoid lower-altitude obstacles that may hit the drone as it comes down to land in a customer’s backyard.

Amazon placed a particular emphasis on the descent phase during the development phase. The company has developed specialized algorithms to detect wires such as electrical cables or clothesline, which are both one of the most common obstacles in a residential environment and among the hardest to detect.

In a meeting with journalists, Wilke said current development work around the drone is focused on improving safety and scalability. In the longer term, he said the company likely will develop additional aircraft optimized for different delivery scenarios. “There will probably be a fleet at some point with different birds for different reasons,” he said.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Amazon