According to a technology podcast, the future of deliveries in the United States is about to change in a big way. In an interview with the hosts of the TechFirst podcast, the Chief Executive Officer of a drone company, Adam Woodworth, said that his firm had already begun using drones to make deliveries from Google-owned centralised warehouses. Woodworth is the CEO of Wing, a company that, like Google, is owned by Alphabet. Technically speaking this means that Wing is a sister company of the internet giant but this does not convey the vast differences in the two firms’ resources. Woodworth told TechFirst that, at the moment, large and bulky items were outside the capacity of current drone technology. Stating that mattresses, domestic electrical appliances and furniture were unlikely to be delivered by drones anytime soon, he nevertheless made it clear that drones were very much in the here and now in the current courier industry in the southern USA.
“The great majority of goods that people order through on-demand suppliers nowadays could be handled by our drone delivery capability very easily,” Woodworth said during the interview. As a former chief technology officer at Wing, it seems that the current CEO isn’t simply talking up the possibilities of drones in courier settings but understands both its capabilities and its limitations very well. During his time on the podcast, Woodworth explained that drone delivery solutions are not suited to every kind of consignment. “If I need to shift a few tons of gravel from one place to another,” he said, “then I should still rent a dump truck.” He said that it would be foolish to put it in the back of a family car because it is a question of finding the right delivery mechanisms for the right job. This may come as a relief to those who ply their trade in the last-mile delivery market in the UK where Wing-like technology may soon be making its presence felt.
Nevertheless, Woodworth went on to say that most of what consumers place online orders for from the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and the ubiquitous US retailer, Walmart, is suited to drone delivery systems. Eyeing the million plus brick and mortar retail outlets in the US alone – not to mention the vast number of online stores which looks soon to surpass the two million figure – he pointed out the simple fact that most consumer goods don’t weigh a couple of tons like a consignment of gravel. “Much of it comes in at just a few pounds,” he said. According to Woodworth, this means that such orders are ripe for drone technology which could soon replace fossil-fuel run trucks that cause particulate emissions wherever they’re driven.
Cheaper Deliveries for Consumers
In the podcast, Woodworth claimed that drone deliveries can be up to ten times as cheap when they are compared to older-style trucks. He cited figures published by a European drone delivery start-up firm named Manna, based in Ireland. Whether these figures are truly borne out in the real world and whether they also take into account energy efficiency measures that the global delivery sector has already taken remains to be seen, however. That being said, Woodworth’s comments clearly show that the drone technology sector thinks it has a twin advantage over current delivery models. To be clear, they think it is both cleaner and cheaper to deliver lower-weight items with electric drones.
Despite the undoubted optimism of Woodworth – and others in the technology-driven delivery sector – there are some limitations that the podcast covered. During the interview, for example, Woodworth agreed that the environmental cost of sending a drone to deliver something light, like a book, a prescription or a pair of socks was much more obvious than it was for larger items, such as toaster ovens. He also said that using one drone for something bulky like an oven was not yet compatible with orders of perishable items since they’d slow deliveries down. He pointed out that an iced drink order, if sent with something like a toaster oven, would make no sense, for example, given that the ice would probably have melted by the time the delivery arrived.
Deliveries for the Information Age
It is worth noting that Wing is, at heart, a Google startup company which is seeking to ‘join up’ its operations from the place where people place orders to when they receive them. Wing graduated from Google’s internal idea development programme, known as Google X only as recently as 2018. In just four years, it has gone from taking the drone concept on paper to making it a practical reality.
Indeed, it was only in 2019 that Wing was awarded with an air operator’s certificate from the relevant body in the US, the FAA. Gaining such approvals might take more time in the European Union but if Wing can adequately demonstrate its abilities in the courier insurance market and a strong safety record, then UK approval for its operations could come more rapidly. For now, it is worth noting that Wing is officially designated as an airline and must, therefore, operate according to all of the rules and regulations that cover air operators in the US today. Since it gained its FAA accreditation, Wing has gone on to deliver in excess of a quarter of a million packages. Notably, this number of deliveries has been attained since April of this year. This is when it launched the first commercial drone delivery service of its kind. Restricted to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas for now, Wing says the time is right to ramp up its initial successes in the market to other locations.
Operating Like an Air Freight Company
One of the principles behind Wing’s operational model is what Woodworth refers to as an aircraft library. What this boils down to is the various different sizes and shapes of aeroplanes that air freight operators make use of for their shipments and cargoes. During the podcast interview Wing’s boss said that two and four-engined planes were used for specific functions. “On the delivery scale of drones, however,” he said, “this would translate to ferrying 2.5 pounds of cargo over a six mile-trip or conveying 15-pound cargoes for about 20 miles using larger drones.” Expanding on this idea, Woodworth said that the air freight model translates well to drone technology when you consider that urgent deliveries, such as medication, tend to be smaller and lighter even though they might need to be refrigerated to maintain their medicinal properties. However, he said that Wing’s experience demonstrated that larger loads don’t necessarily require the same levels of urgency so slower drones are more suited to those sorts of jobs.
As you might expect of a sister company of Google, acquiring real-world data has been one of the priorities of Wing’s operations in Texas over the last few months. Woodworth said that because of the amount of flying and testing time his company has already been able to complete, Wing has accumulated a huge amount of data on the core reusable systems that make a drone work. The information collected is already being deployed in newly developed AI algorithms to help with things like avionic systems, battery management, motor controllers and payloads, among other aspects of flying goods. Wing is already making a software system that will help it to choose the drone that will be best for each delivery job that comes in at lightning speed.
Drone Infrastructure
“The infrastructure for drone deliveries will have to be both simple and modular if it is to be a part of the future as we see it,” Woodworth said. Pointing to the company’s other, more recent activities in Australia, he said that Wing had installed drone infrastructure – known as nests – onto the roof of a shopping mall. This allows drones to land safely and to access the power they need to recharge. In addition, they connect to the internet without any human intervention to find out what their next delivery assignment might be. “That is the sort of level of infrastructure configuration that I think the future necessitates,” the technology CEO said.
Of course, the future of drone technology in last-mile deliveries is still uncertain. At the moment, Wing only has licenses to carry out its operations in Texas, Canberra and a location in the Finnish capital city of Helsinki. Nevertheless, Woodworth made it clear during his interview that he and the rest of Wing’s leadership team were focussed on expansion. “It isn’t going to be instant,” he warned. Instead, he said the model they were looking at would be more like adding one city here and another one there for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, in places where Wing does begin operating, he said that consumers could expect expanding zones of operation as drone technology improved. If and when a British city starts accepting Wing deliveries is still uncertain but one is for sure – few would currently bet on this sort of technology not becoming relatively normal in the UK within the next decade or so.