We’ve all experienced being lost in the parking lot, looking for the car. It’s so common, iOS 10 has a car-finder built into Apple Maps. But why use a simple technology like that, when you can perch a tiny drone on your shoulder to swoop around and find your car for you? At least, that’s what Amazon seems to be hoping you’ll think.
New Atlas has found that Amazon has patented a tiny personal drone that lives on your shoulder and handles annoying tasks like tracking children for you. Simply ask it to find your car or see what your kid has gotten into now, and it will swoop away, scanning for barcodes, RFID tag, or using recognition software to spot the object, or person, in question. A more likely application the patent discusses is first responders and police officers using it to spot fires, locate huddles of people around an injured person, and other uses that will speed up response time and potentially save lives.
Being just a patent, at the moment, it doesn’t seem likely Amazon will be putting this up for Prime members any time soon. But the company is obsessed with drones, and it’s more and more been delving into personal hardware activated by voice, which is why you can’t escape ads for the Echo Dot, Amazon’s chirpy question-answering hockey puck. So while this may only be a dream right now, a personal Amazon drone might be arriving sooner than we think.
(via New Atlas)
