Alphabet’s Project Wing testing delivery drones in rural Australia
Alphabet’s Project Wing has revealed that it has been testing the use of drones to make deliveries to home in rural southeastern Australia. In a blog posted yesterday (16 October), James Ryan Burgess, Co-Lead of Project Wing, said that what made the tests currently taking places in Australia different from the “thousands of flights” that the company has already conducted over the past few years is that they are “making deliveries directly to people’s yards”.
Alphabet has been working on the tests with two retailers: Guzman y Gomez, a Mexican food chain; and Chemist Warehouse, a chain of pharmacies.
The testers taking part in the drone trials live on the outskirts of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
According to Burgess: “Last year at Virginia Tech, our first deliveries with members of the public were in an open field, not to a specific address or location. Now, with each delivery, we encounter a new yard space with its own layout of trees, sheds, fences, and power lines. That means that in addition to learning what people want delivered, we also have to learn how to best deliver items to people.”
