Just last month, Amazon made headlines when it filed a patent for a drone tower design, essentially a multi-level fulfillment center for unmanned aerial vehicles in densely populated areas. 

Now a recent Amazon patent for "Aquatic Storage Facilities" has surfaced, allowing us a glimpse into the engineers' quest to overcome limitations in storage capabilities, tackle inefficient use of space in vast fulfillment centers, and eliminate the extremely long distances staff members or robots have to cover when fulfilling orders. 

"Because today's online marketplaces offer a wide variety of items to customers [...]," the patent description explains, "fulfillment centers now include increasingly large and complex facilities having expansive capabilities and high-technology accommodations for items, and feature storage areas as large as one million square feet or more. Therefore, in order to prepare and ship an order that includes a large number or different types of items to a customer, a staff member or robot may be required to walk several thousand feet, or even miles, within a fulfillment center in order to retrieve the items in fulfillment of the order. Where a customer submits multiple orders for items, the arduous task of picking, packaging and shipping ordered items must often be repeated for each and every order."

The patent goes on to describe the reasons that inspired this invention: "Moreover, for all of their technological advancements, today's fulfillment centers are still plagued by the inefficient use of space. For example, fulfillment centers are commonly box-shaped buildings having a plurality storage spaces, areas or units, each of which is sized and sufficiently durable to support loads of a standard or nominal size or dimension (e.g., fifty pounds, nine cubic feet, or forty pounds per square inch), regardless of whether the spaces, areas or units are actually so loaded."

See the "Aquatic Storage Facilities" patent document in its entirety, and learn more about the details of the invention, here.