Amazon Patent Imagines A Drone That Recognizes Hand Signals

We know that Amazon is interested in using drones as a way of delivering packages to customers. Now it looks like in a patent filed by Amazon and discovered by GeekWire, it seems that Amazon might have some interesting ideas on how their customers might be able to interact with these drones.

According to the patent and the accompanying diagram (see above), it seems to suggest that customers could use hand gestures or even speech to direct the drone. Amazon says that this could be used to adjust plans for a drone after getting feedback from humans via visual gestures or through audio.

It is possible that maybe these gestures could be used to identify customers to ensure that the drone is making the delivery to the right house, where waving at it could get its attention and be used to identify the customer through facial recognition. It could also potentially be used by customers to indicate that the drone should land near where they are, or shouldn’t land at that area due to lack of space or for whatever other reason.

It is unknown as to whether or not this patent will ever be put into practice, but like we said, Amazon is definitely interested in using drones for delivery so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that they might have quite a few ideas that they cooked up.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Robots
Tags: Amazon, Drones, Patent