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Google Wing believes its delivery drones will soon be able to pick up packages from individual businesses, representing a ‘holy grail’ breakthrough for the sector.
Speaking on the Australian Aviation Podcast, the business’s general manager, Simon Rossi, said the company could implement the change in this country by the end of the year.
Wing launched commercially in 2019 in Australia and allows for the delivery of packages weighing less than 1.5 kilograms, such as coffees and sandwiches. However, the tech is currently limited to picking up packages from stores that locate within its distribution centre, shopping mall roofs and supermarket car parks.
Rossi said the company is currently embarking on an upgrade to its system that will eventually enable point-to-point delivery to take place.
“We’re really confident that we will be testing that in the market in Australia in 2023,” he said.
The development could potentially open drone delivery to any business, effectively revolutionising the technology and opening it up to a global delivery industry worth billions.
In the US alone, the drone delivery industry is estimated to grow from $680 million in 2020 to $54 billion by 2030, but there’s no reason it couldn’t take over the $272 billion food delivery market, too.
It comes shortly after Wing announced it would overhaul how its devices pick up packages by removing the need for a store employee to wait for the aircraft to arrive.
The business said the change and other improvements to its charging processes could allow its drones to shift to delivering millions of parcels a year.
Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said last month, “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.
“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.
“As with many other areas of technology, from data centres to smartphones, the physical hardware is only as useful as the software and logistics networks that make it meaningful for organisations and their customers.
“By the middle of 2024, we expect our system to handle tens of millions of deliveries for millions of consumers at a lower cost per delivery than ground transportation can achieve for the fast delivery of small packages.”
Wing started life in 2012 as one of the first projects at the tech giant’s super-secretive research lab, Google X, alongside its augmented reality eyeglasses and self-driving cars.
It launched its first trials in 2018 before starting more commercial flights the following year in both Canberra and Logan.
Once a customer submits an order via the app, the drone flies to pick up the package at the designated delivery centre before climbing to a cruise height of 45 metres and flying to the destination.
Once there, it hovers and lowers the package to the ground, automatically unclipping the parcel without assistance from the customer.
The business, technically a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, now conducts more deliveries in Australia than in any other country and has previously dubbed Logan the “drone delivery capital of the world”.
It initially operated from stores located within Google’s distribution centre but then shifted to picking up packages from the roof of shopping malls and then supermarket car parks.
The new episode of the Australian Aviation Podcast will be released later this week.
The Australian Aviation print magazine featured an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at its operation in 2021, which Premium Content subscribers can read here. We then took another look at its evolution into delivering from retail premises in our drone In Focus digital edition.
