Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, reportedly wants to form a drone delivery network that will be able to complete millions of orders each year. The company said the drones will be a network operation that will improve efficiency.
The technology is being tested at “scale” in Logan, Australia, where Wing delivers up to 1,000 packages a day. The company is also testing drone deliveries in Lusk, a suburb of Dublin.
Wing said they and other companies are in talks with the U.K. Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority to agree on regulations that would allow drone deliveries.
Chief executive Adam Woodworth said the delivery system looks “more like an efficient data network than a traditional transport system.
He added that in the experiment “we did a lot of grocery deliveries, we did a lot of deli deliveries, and we did a lot of coffee deliveries.”
For now, consumers will not be charged extra for drone deliveries. The company has not disclosed the final price of the service. But experts say that in order to be financially sustainable, drone companies will have to make a large number of deliveries.
Dr. Steve Wright of the University of the West of England said it’s no surprise that Wing is one of the companies trying to make home-free deliveries a reality. Everyone is still working on the drones themselves, which will operate non-stop at night and during the day, far more than we’ve ever done before, but now the thinking has shifted to larger application scenarios,” he said. The first issue that companies are now grappling with is regulation. However, the next problem is already looming, and that is how to manage and direct this huge number of robots. And the answer is big data, as both Wing and Amazon have seen.”
Wing’s drone delivery network includes three basic hardware elements: delivery drones, a drone landing and charging platform and an automated loader that allows companies to leave packages for collection.
Using these elements, the company said, drones can pick up, deliver and return for charging in the mode that makes the most sense for the entire system, rather than just flying from a base to a customer and back.
Woodworth said in an interview, “A specific example would be a drone that takes off at one location, it might fly to another business to pick up a box, and then it might fly to the delivery location and then instead of returning to its takeoff platform, it would fly to another adjacent location.”
The advantage of having the system work as a network is its ability to quickly adapt to peaks in demand in a given area. The location of charging pads can also be added quickly.
The company says the system also has a high level of automation, and when a drone is launched, it checks the following things: whether the drone is in the right location, whether it’s carrying the right software, and whether it’s authorized to take off.
Instead of just monitoring one drone, ground pilots can oversee a fleet of delivery drones to ensure they are operating safely and efficiently.
Woodworth said more civil aviation regulators around the world are adopting rules that allow such operations. But the project also has some challenges to overcome, such as complaints from local residents about noise.
Woodworth said the company has put “a lot of work into making the aircraft as quiet as possible. The planning software is designed to avoid creating a “drone highway,” where each flight passes the same houses.
