We know that Amazon is keen on the idea of drones, and may one day use them to carry packages to our doorsteps, but a newly filed patent shows the company is thinking about miniature flying machines too.
These tiny drones would be small enough to sit on your shoulder or fit in your pocket, the patent says, and a lot of the processing required by the devices would be offloaded to the cloud to keep them small and nippy.
The patent includes a couple of interesting example use cases too: a drone zooming up to check on the length of a queue at your next music festival, or a police officer using one to tail a suspect in a chase.
Keep droning on
It sounds like the controls would be largely automatic and voice-driven - so you would tell the drone what you wanted it to do rather than fishing out a remote control. No doubt Amazon's smart AI assistant Alexa is going to be involved somewhere down the line too.
These pocket drones could be used to track down lost property, check where you parked at the shopping centre or even keep an eye on your kids if they've got a tendency to wander off, Amazon says.
As with any patent application, it's only a sign of what a company is thinking about, and there's no guarantee this will ever become a real product. Still, Alexa in a drone is an idea that has a certain appeal to it.
Via GeekWire
