‘Capable Of Handling Tens Of Millions Of Deliveries For Millions Of Consumers’

Google sister company Wing is adding complex route management and self-loading capability for its drone delivery fleet that will make it capable of handling tens of millions of deliveries for millions of consumers by mid 2024, CEO Adam Woodworth says.

Wing is testing drone delivery at low to medium scale in 10 global locations, including Queensland, Australia and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It hit 100,000 total drone deliveries two years ago, kicked off mall-to-home drone delivery in early 2021, and unveiled an “aircraft library” in mid 2022 to be able to quickly build drones that are efficient for multiple different tasks.

Now the company is adding hands-free pickup and smarter drone management in preparation for scaling the service.

“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,” says Woodworth. “We see drone delivery at scale looking more like an efficient data network than a traditional transportation system. As with many other areas of technology, from data centers to smartphones, the physical hardware is only as useful as the software and logistics networks that make it meaningful for organizations and their customers.”

In other words, drones from Wing won’t just fly point-to-point routes: fly from a hub (Wing calls them “pads”) to a retailer, pick up a package, deliver the package, and fly back to the hub. Rather, they’ll follow complex and ever-changing routes as needs change, picking up, dropping off, recharging when necessary at various hubs, and acting, for all intents and purposes, like a Uber in the skies that never needs to go “home.”

A key new component: autoloaders.

Autoloaders let retail staff pre-load a delivery package and walk away. The package is held in the autoloader — a tiny tower with V-shaped arms that fits in part of a parking space — until a drone comes by and autonomously picks it up.

“Our automated network will select a drone to retrieve the package and deliver it to a customer, freeing employees from needing to wait for a drone to arrive in order to load the package,” a Wing representative told me via email. “For a retailer, this will make loading drones as simple as handing it to a waiting on-demand delivery driver.”

Google showcases the process in a video:

Another gamechanger that allows Wing to operate its drone fleet as an integrated multi-hop system is the company’s drones themselves.

Unlike most delivery drones, they fly like an airplane while also having the ability to hover and maneuver like a drone. That means Wing has the ability to fly long distances efficiently, using less batteries than drones that must expend energy merely to stay aloft for every second of every flight.

The result: longer flight times, more efficient battery usage, and essentially, longer uptime.

Wing is clearly looking to scale significantly soon. While the company has completed 300,000 deliveries to date, Woodworth is preparing to go big: tens of millions of deliveries for millions of customers. Essentially, that means normalizing drone delivery for the masses.

And, of course, for local businesses.

“Building drone delivery into the last mile can be as simple as ordering drones, turning them on, and letting them connect to the network,” he says. “Wing Delivery Network can also automate compliance with regulation–each time a plane is turned on it checks that it’s in the right place, has the right software, and is ready and approved to fly.”

Wing is targeting the middle of 2024 for this kind of scale, touting “store to door” delivery times of 15 minutes at low cost and with 50 times greater efficiency than gas-powered delivery cars and trucks.

The question is, however, whether the regulatory environment in the U.S. will also be ready at that point.