Our Prime Air teams in Cambridge are playing an important role building our future delivery system designed to safely get parcels to customers in 30 minutes or less using small unmanned aerial vehicles, also called drones.

I’ll miss this place!
Steeple Morden Primary School student

As part of our Amazon in the Community investment programme, we want to support students in studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). As part of this, we recently opened the doors to our Prime Air lab in our Cambridge Development Centre to school groups and interested community organisations by hosting tours. The tours aim to inspire kids to consider careers that require STEM skills by showing various stages of drone development and robotics innovation.

The first Amazon Prime Air tour took place on Friday, 18 October and hosted a group of Year 5 primary school children. Eight students from Steeple Morden Primary School, a village school in the southwest of Cambridgeshire, and their teacher enjoyed presentations from Prime Air team members.

Students learned about how 3D printing has helped the team iterate quickly on designs, experienced our vehicles’ sense-and-avoid technology through a unique flight simulator, and got the opportunity to fly mini drones in our flight cage. Upon leaving, one of the boys said, “I’ll miss this place!”

Lab tours will continue through January 2017 for schools and other children’s groups in the local community.