Amazon's new patent wants to see products stored underwater
Online retailer giant Amazon, has come up with another way to meet consumer’s increasing demands: An underwater warehouse.
Following its previous proposal for a flying warehouse, it seems the retailer is looking beneath the surface for a solution to its storage issues.
In a proposal released last week, Amazon showcased a patent for a warehouse design that looks like something out of a James Bond film.
The retailer proposes to store its goods in depots submerged in lakes and reservoirs, using the bodies of waters as ‘fulfilment centres.’ For those of us who don’t work at Amazon a fulfilment centre is basically a giant warehouse where products are stored before they are delivered to your door.
Products will be dropped into these aquatic storage facilities by parachute. They would then sink to the bottom of the water, safely concealed in water and air tight containers along with an air canister.
When someone orders a product, a noise transmitter sends vibrations under the water that trigger the air canister to inflate a balloon. This causes the package to float to the surface. Once the goods are floating on the water, delivery men (or potentially drones!) will pick it up and whisk it off to its destination.
The underwater storage areas could provide the solution for a number of issues facing current storage systems above ground, some of which Amazon highlights in the proposal.
Currently fulfilment centres require a lot of unnecessary work for Amazon employees.
The proposal highlights that to meet consumer’s ever expanding requirements, fulfilment centres now feature storage areas as large as “one million square feet.” Therefore in order to find the items to fulfil an order, Amazon employees can be required to walk “several thousand feet.”
That sounds exhausting.
Alongside this, Amazon insists that “for all their technological advancements, today’s fulfilment centers are still plagued by the inefficient use of space.”
Amazon hope that the proposal could create a more efficient way of storing goods and speed up the process of getting products to customers.
This is the latest in a series of futuristic proposals that the company have patented. Last year Amazon proposed ‘warehouses carried by airships.’ The premise behind that particular patent was that warehouses would float above the city and be used to deliver items to consumers incredibly quickly.
So, would you want your brand new kindle being stored underwater before you get your hands on it? Tweet us at @DesignCurial.
