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Amazon made its first successful product delivery by unmanned drone in December, and the online retailer had already been thinking ahead for ways to improve air delivery.
Amazon filed a patent in 2014 for what the company calls “airborne fulfillment centers,” according to the patent documents.
These airborne fulfillment centers would be large warehouses that look like blimps and would store products tens of thousands of feet high in the sky, Business Insider reports.
Instead of delivering products to businesses and customers’ homes by flying drones from standard, earth-bound distribution centers, Amazon would send drones from the airborne fulfillment centers.
Drones use a “considerable amount of energy” to make deliveries, and the airborne warehouses could reduce energy consumption, Business Insider reports.
The Amazon patent states the following:
“As the [unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs] descend, they can navigate horizontally toward a user specified delivery location using little to no power, other than to stabilize the UAV and/or guide the direction of descent.”
In order to make this vision a reality, Amazon will likely have to “overcome some regulatory hurdles,” Business Insider says.
Amazon has already faced significant obstacles to using unmanned drones to deliver packages, and thus far has not gotten approval to do so in the U.S. The retailer’s first unmanned deliveries were in England, according to The Wall Street Journal.
