Last month, Wing announced a pilot program in the United States to deliver goods with drones. The first “air deliveries” were completed this afternoon in Christiansburg, Virginia.
Last month, Wing announced that it was trialing U.S. drone deliveries with FedEx and Walgreens in Virginia. The Alphabet company is a leader in the space and looks ready to more widely publicize what it’s calling “air delivery” in its first Wing ad.
In April, Wing received approval for a drone delivery service in Virginia. The Alphabet division announced today that a pilot program is coming this fall with FedEx Express and Walgreens.
Besides building vehicles and operating a delivery service, Wing is working on an air traffic control system for all drones. The Alphabet division today officially introduced an app called OpenSky to help pilots operate their vehicles in Australia.
Alphabet’s Wing drone delivery service is slowly spreading. Following its debut in Australia recently and approval for service in Virginia, Wing has just announced that it’ll be making deliveries in Helsinki, Finland starting next month.
Earlier this month, Wing launched a commercial delivery service in Australia. The Alphabet company now has similar approval from the FAA to operate in Virginia and provide deliveries via drone.
Wing dropped its “Project” status when it graduated from X last July. After several years of testing around the world, the Alphabet company has received approval to launch a commercial service in Canberra, Australia that will also feature a quieter drone.
Retailers and tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon are exploring drones to more efficiently deliver goods to customers. Wing graduated from the X Moonshot Factory in July, but has been conducting tests for several years now. A new report details what living with the pilot program is like.
Back in July, Wing graduated from X to become its own independent company within Alphabet. After testing in Australia, the drone delivery division is expanding to Europe with a trial in Finland this spring.
Two of X’s aerial projects are graduating from the Moonshot Factory today to become independent Alphabet companies like Waymo and Verily. Dropping the “project” status, Loon will continue to deliver internet via balloons, while Wing is focusing on a variety of drone-related efforts.
In 2017, Alphabet’s drone delivery program reemerged following financial tightening during the prior year. Project Wing has now added a former Amazon executive to head operations in a sign that it’s possibly nearing a commercial launch.
It has been a little quiet around Alphabet’s Project Wing, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress. Over the last few years, Project Wing has made thousands of test flights and now they are ready to start testing burrito deliveries… again.
The test market is Queanbeyan, South Eastern Australia, where two merchants have signed up for Project Wing. Guzman y Gomez, a Mexican food chain, and Chemist Warehouse, a chain of pharmacies. These companies will receive orders from test consumers, who’ve purchased items using the Project Wing app on their smartphones. Project Wing’s drones will then fly out and make the deliveries.
Following Google Fiber halting future deployment, another Alphabet project is being paused as part of continued financial tightening at the Mountain View company. Bloomberg reports that the Project Wing drone unit is slowing down, reducing employees, and canceling a previously unknown delivery partnership with Starbucks.
Announced last week, Alphabet and Chipotle’s drone delivery program is already underway at Virginia Tech. The local Roanoke Times was able to snap several images of the ongoing tests, with the whole process sounding quite underwhelming.
Project Wing, a unit of Alphabet, the holding company formerly known as Google, announced today that it will begin delivering Chipotle via Drones to Virginia Tech college students in Blacksburg. You aren’t dreaming. This is real.
My first reaction was checking the calendar (not April 1st) and then lamenting that I grew up in the wrong era. But immediately after that I began wondering if even Google is going to be able to scale this to meet demand…
Drones have become very popular among consumers over the last few years, with various applications mainly in photography and videography, but their potential suggests that there soon could be a slew of additional uses that normal people could benefit from. Particularly, drones could turn out to be very helpful for delivery of physical objects or perhaps an Internet connection.
According to Quartz, a new Google patent filed recently is all about a potential medical use. While last year the idea of medical equipment-carrying drones had already been patented by the search giant, it looks like the company may have found a viable method via which users could contact the devices…
Many of Google’s internal projects go unannounced for a variety of reasons, but now we’ve uncovered one of them thanks to a year-old video hidden deep in the archive of a Silicon Valley filmmaker’s Vimeo account. Called Project Blackrock, this initiative from Google sought to make quadcopters autonomous with the help of a pair of cameras and a computer…
Update: A report out of Re/code says that these drones aren’t actually Project Wing drones. They’re rather being registered for the company’s other drone project, Project Titan, which intends to provide internet access to remote or disaster-stricken locations. Google’s Project Titan is not to be confused with Apple’s Project Titan.
A couple of months ago, a report surfaced suggesting that Google was sidestepping FAA regulations by getting special approval from NASA to test its Project Wing delivery drones in the US. Now, it looks like the company (via Engadget) is actually getting approval for at least a couple of drones, as evidenced by a couple of entries in the FAA’s official registry…
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Google is testing its Project Wing unmanned aircrafts, otherwise known as drones, over United States soil with quiet approval by NASA, according to a new report by the Guardian. The technology giant would otherwise have to receive a 333 exemption by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a waiver issued to commercial companies testing the use of UASs (unmanned aircrafts), as the commercial operation of these aircrafts is banned in the United States.
Google’s head of Google[x] Astro Teller took the stage today at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, to talk about the Mountain View company’s secretive experimental lab and the things that the team has learned over years of showing its ambitious projects to the world (via The Verge). Teller spent a lot of time talking about Google Glass—which is definitely one the better known projects to come out of Google[x]—and how this fame was actually part of where Google failed…
Earlier this year, Amazon unveiled its plans for using drones to deliver products to customers, and now Google has revealed that it is working on something similar. According to two separate reports from The Atlantic and BBC, the secretive Google X team has been hard at work on Project Wing, a drone-based delivery system, for more than two years.
The idea of Google using drones to deliver goods is something that 9to5Google has reported on for some time now, including as far back as October of 2012, and again a few months later. Google said the following in a statement regarding Project Wing:
Project Wing is a Google[x] project that is developing a delivery system that uses self-flying vehicles. As part of our research, we built a vehicle and traveled to Queensland, Australia for some test flights. There, we successfully delivered a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to a couple of Australian farmers.
We’re only just beginning to develop the technology to make a safe delivery system possible, but we think that there’s tremendous potential to transport goods more quickly, safely and efficiently.
