What is "Multi-Level Fulfillment Center", an urban delivery center for Amazon's drone delivery premise?

Amazon's delivery center for crowded cities "Multi-Level Fulfillment Center"We are pending a patent on patents. From its strange shape, the strategy for efficiently capturing the narrow land that is a neck is obvious.

United States Patent Application: 0170175413
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=20170175413.PGNR.

Amazon's fulfillment center (delivery center) is a warehouse for temporary storage of goods, which requires a vast land for storing vast amounts of goods in a plane, a suburb It is installed in. As a result, medium- and long-distance delivery is unavoidable to deliver goods from the fulfillment center to customers, as well as the cost of shipping costs as well as the time to arrive at the customer's products. It is an indispensable task not only to reduce Amazon's expenses, but also to expand "fast delivery" service.


Nonetheless, securing a vast land for fulfillment centers in overcrowded urban areas is not realistic. So, Amazon has applied for a patent on a delivery center called "Multi-Level Fulfillment Center (MLFC)", a fulfillment center for urban areas.

The design proposal of MLFC is as follows. While the conventional fulfillment center was spreading in a plane, we reduced the area of ​​the site by stretching it vertically like a tower apartment. And on the premise of using a drone for delivery, drunks who brought the goods will fly off the customer like the birds that jump out of the nest box.


Incidentally, Amazon also has a patent on the street light type drone port system which makes Dolone inconveniently town in the town.

Amazon burning to practical use of drone flights gets a patent for a system that makes a drone incomplete on "street lights" - GIGAZINE


The inside of the MLFC looks like this.


On each floor there are also robots that carry pickers for goods and drone.


A system to recover the returned drone. 612 seems to absorb shock using cushioning material.


There seems to be various kinds of appearance of MLFC.


By constructing MLFC, Amazon has been focusing on solving the "last one mile problem" using drone, but also utilizing short-term employment type delivery flights using "white Taku" like Uber, We plan to further strengthen the network of "fast delivery" at.