Alphabet's Wing starts drone deliveries in greater San Francisco area
With its own developed drone technology, the company is able to deliver small packages even in densely populated areas.
(Image: Dmitry Kalinovsky/Shutterstock.com)
Alphabet subsidiary Wing plans to expand its drone delivery service for private households to the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming months. The start-up announced this on Monday. It has developed drone technology that can safely fly small packages directly to homes in densely populated residential areas, according to the company, thus finding a solution to a problem that all delivery services face. “Traditional last-mile delivery remains slow, expensive, and inefficient for small, urgent, and local orders.”
Wing's lightweight, highly automated drones use VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) technology. This means they can take off and land vertically like a helicopter; in the air, they then transition to an energy-efficient glide, comparable to small aircraft.
Pilot project on the Google campus
According to its own statements, Wing initially launched its drone delivery service in the Bay Area on the Google campus in Mountain View. In a pilot test, office supplies, for example, were delivered to various offices on campus in real-time. The positive feedback has encouraged Wing to expand its service to other districts in the greater San Francisco area, the company explained.
The greater San Francisco area holds particular significance for Wing, “as the company was founded in the Bay Area in 2012 through Google's 'X', the Moonshot Factory.” Moonshot Factory is a research unit that supports Alphabet start-ups like the robotaxi company Waymo and assists them in spinning off into independent companies.
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Hundreds of thousands of deliveries
Wing already delivers groceries and household goods for large customers such as the US supermarket chain Walmart or the on-demand delivery service DoorDash by drone in some of the largest metropolitan areas in the USA, including Houston, Atlanta, and Dallas. The drone start-up has thus already completed over 750,000 deliveries and serves well over two million customers.
In October 2024, Wing also launched a pilot project in Dallas with the robot delivery company Serve Robotics to expand the delivery radius of the delivery robots using drones. In this project, Serve Robotics robots pick up food deliveries from restaurants and hand them over to Wing drones for aerial delivery.
(akn)
