Despite the flurry of innovation taking place within the nascent drone delivery industry, there’s one area the vast majority of drone firms wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole: cities.
Simply put, drone logistics are more challenging in urban environments. How will they avoid not just people but also tall buildings? How will they pick up orders from stores in densely packed city centers? And most importantly, where will they land?
That’s why, until now, drones have found most of their success in rural or suburban settings, where space is plenty and little additional infrastructure is needed. But there are a handful of firms that know all of this and simply say, “Bring it on.”
Among them is Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) drone arm Wing, which on Thursday unveiled a blueprint for the creation of fully autonomous, citywide drone delivery networks — with a twist.
Watch: Every company is a drone company
Rather than complete point-to-point trips from a single store, Wing’s drones will behave more like last-mile delivery vans. The firm envisions the aircraft picking up orders, dropping them off and charging themselves anywhere within the network, traveling in patterns that mirror consumer demand. Throughout the day, the drone may not even return to its point of origin.
For example, an aircraft could start the day by completing a delivery from a Walgreens downtown. But by the end of the day, it may have traveled to stores uptown, on the east side, on the west side and everywhere in between.
“Up to this point, the industry has been fixated on drones themselves — designing, testing, and iterating on aircraft, rather than finding the best way to harness an entire fleet for efficient delivery,” wrote Wing CEO Adam Woodward in a blog post. “Wing’s approach to delivery is different. We see drone delivery at scale looking more like an efficient data network than a traditional transportation system.”
The new model, Wing Delivery Network, will be deployed over the next 12 months. In the video above, Woodward compares it to a rideshare system — it relies on the firm’s proprietary logistics automation software to allocate drones to orders and identify Wing “pads” where they can take off, land and recharge.
The software will also communicate with a new piece of hardware the firm revealed Tuesday, a solution called the Autoloader. Much like warehouses streamline operations with automated sortation and packing stations, the technology will allow store associates to prepare orders for delivery simply by loading a package into the machine.
Essentially, the solution is curbside pickup for drones. Once Wing’s system confirms a package is in the Autoloader, a drone is immediately dispatched to pick up and deliver it. For participating retailers, the new tech aims to make drone delivery as simple as working with platforms like DoorDash or Uber Eats — minus the traffic and emissions.
But the key to the Wing Delivery Network is the way the drones interact with the ecosystem of Autoloaders, charging stations and landing pads.
“Drones within the Wing Delivery Network can pick up, drop off, travel, and charge in whatever pattern makes the most sense for the entire system,” Woodward explained. “For example, with multiple charging spots, they’ll have the flexibility to meet peaks in consumer demand across entire cities. Pad locations can be added simply, with the aircraft themselves used as the surveying tools to update and expand the network.”
This means that all retailers need to do to get a drone delivery service up and running is order the aircraft and connect them to Wing’s network. The firm will automate the rest, from dispatching to routing and even regulatory compliance — it verifies that each drone is in the right place, with the right software, and is approved to fly.
The network will not be rolled out all at once. But by mid-2024, Woodward predicts it will handle tens of millions of rapid deliveries of small packages at a lower cost than ground transportation would be able to achieve.
Although urban drone delivery is seen as more complex than rural or suburban, Wing is one of the few firms that has been there before.
The firm has introduced innovative pickup and drop-off locations like rooftops and parking lots that make unique use of space. It has released prototypes of aircraft both large and small, light-duty and heavy-duty.
And most importantly, the company already flies in densely populated metro areas outside Dallas-Fort Worth, Brisbane and Canberra, Australia, and Helsinki, Finland. Across those locations, it’s achieved a top delivery speed under three minutes and a record-high of over 10,000 deliveries in a single day.
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