Google won patent for self-driving delivery trucks

While driverless cars by Tesla and Amazon's Prime Air delivery drones around the corner, Google came up with a combination of both –– driverless and for delivery.

As spotted by Quartz first, a new patent has been awarded to Google that suggests that the tech giant is looking to develop a self driving delivery trucks. The Autonomous Delivery platform patent would put Amazon Locker like containers on the back of a self-driving trucks, that allows users to just type their code or scan a NFC chip to collect their packages.

The person waiting to collect their package will be sent a unique pin before truck arrives to the destination, and users can collect their parcel by just typing their respective codes on a vending machine like setup on the truck. The users can pay with their debit/credit cards directly for 'cash-on-delivery' packages. After the delivery is dropped off, truck either returns to the depot to fill more packages, or continue on to its next delivery point.

The patent largely focus the main purpose of this truck for last-mile delivery rather than cross-country shipping. The truck have an advantage over drones in the sense that it could probably reach the dense urban areas where drones aren't allowed to fly, let alone dropping boxes from the sky.

However, it's interesting to see Google exploring options to address a problem many e-commerce startups faces with last-mile delivery, but are they serious enough to take it further? only time will tell.

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Source: US Patent and Trademark Office

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An Electronics Engineer by education, a part-time blogger by passion. He loves everything about technology, hence he writes about it. Interest includes Technology, Startups and Mobile Applications.