Amazon Prime Air secretly recruited an all-star computer vision team

Amazon has quietly recruited a team of computer vision all-stars to work on giving its Prime Air delivery drones the skills to navigate the skies – and land – safely. The team, which includes former Microsoft engineers, is based in Graz, Austria, and will be responsible for ensuring that the retail behemoth's rapid delivery system doesn't crash and burn.

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That's about more than just spotting a flat space in your back yard and dropping from the sky with your last-minute printer toner delivery, some of the engineers on the newly-formed team explained to The Verge. In fact, it's a complex system involving not only computer vision but semantic parsing to figure out the back-story behind what the drones are seeing.

NOW READ: A closer look at Amazon's Prime Air drones

Amazon's Prime Air proposal seemed like an April Fools joke when CEO Jeff Bezos first announced it, a system whereby time-sensitive deliveries could be shuttled from the company's warehouses to customers – at least, those within fifteen miles – in under thirty minutes.

In fact, it's a possibility the retailer is taking very seriously. The new computer vision team – said to include some of the most notable experts in Europe among its dozen members – is the core of what's to be a new technology development center in Austria, initially tasked with giving autonomous drones the smarts they need to survive in the wild.

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Meanwhile Amazon has been pushing government regulators to make the testing environment more open-minded

Unlike remotely-controlled UAVs which are piloted, potentially at a distance, but always with a human at the controls, the Prime Air drones will be expected to handle safe navigation themselves. That includes identifying other objects in flight, whether a fellow drone, a plane or helicopter, or birds, but also figuring out what the best place to set down might be.

"A swimming pool may be a perfectly flat landing spot from a geometric point of view," Konrad Karner explains, "but not exactly where we want our drones delivering packages!"

As a result, there'll be drone-to-drone communication as well as the sort of sonar, laser range-finder, and other sensors that we've seen used extensively in autonomous car projects, but also a solid amount of onboard, standalone intelligence. After all, as the team points out, each Prime Air craft needs to be able to react near-instantaneously to any perils or unexpected obstacles it encounters, in addition to spotting possible hazards entering an identified landing space.

Amazon is yet to give a launch date for Prime Air deliveries to kick off, and a commercial service going operational is heavily dependent on regulatory approval.

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