FeaturedNews

Wing Drone Delivery: “Capable Of Handling Tens Of Millions Of Deliveries For Millions Of Consumers” By Mid 2024

Wing drone deliv­ery 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”, says CEO Adam Wood­worth in a press release.

Present­ly, The com­pa­ny is tri­alling its drone deliv­ery at low to medi­um scale in 10 glob­al loca­tions, includ­ing Queens­land, Aus­tralia, Helsin­ki, Fin­land and the Dal­las-Fort Worth region, U.S. Wing struck 100,000 total drone deliv­er­ies two years ago, 300,000 a year lat­er and will sur­pass 500,000 this year. These craft are trans­port­ing up to 1,000 pack­ages a day in a deliv­ery area of 100,000 or more peo­ple.

Wing has worked in recent years to enable its drone deliv­ery “to inte­grate seam­less­ly” with exist­ing deliv­ery infra­struc­ture for restau­rants and retail­ers. Deliv­ery ser­vices are being launched from park­ing lots and rooftops while being inte­grat­ed with well-known deliv­ery apps. Now the com­pa­ny is adding hands-free pick­up and smarter drone man­age­ment in prepa­ra­tion for scal­ing the ser­vice.

Adam Wood­worth

Wood­worth com­ments, “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. We see drone deliv­ery at scale look­ing more like an effi­cient data net­work than a tra­di­tion­al trans­porta­tion sys­tem.”

He con­tin­ues, “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.”

Watch Video

Wing’s vision is this: Its drones won’t just fly point-to-point routes i.e move from a hub (Wing calls them “nests”) to a retail­er, pick up a pack­age, deliv­er it and fly back to the nest. Rather, they will 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.”

To achieve this sci­ence fic­tion dream, Wing are intro­duc­ing a key new com­po­nent called “Autoload­ers,” that allow retail staff to pre-load a deliv­ery pack­age and then walk away. This 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.

A Wing spokesper­son told forbes.com, “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. For a retail­er, this will make load­ing drones as sim­ple as hand­ing it to a wait­ing deliv­ery dri­ver.”

The net­work is man­aged by logis­tics automa­tion soft­ware that con­stant­ly allo­cates hard­ware resources at a city or metro-wide scale. The soft­ware man­ages three basic hard­ware ele­ments: Deliv­ery drones; “Pads or Nests” where drones take­off, land, and recharge their bat­ter­ies between trips; and AutoLoad­ers that allow retail­ers to pre­load pack­ages for auto­mat­ic pick­up.

The design of Wing’s drones help this “inte­grat­ed mul­ti-hop sys­tem” as they are light in weight and manoeu­vrable with a good bat­tery charge length, allow­ing the com­pa­ny “to go big” with the dream of achiev­ing “tens of mil­lions of deliv­er­ies for mil­lions of cus­tomers.”

Wood­worth points out, “Build­ing drone deliv­ery into the last mile can be as sim­ple as order­ing drones, turn­ing them on, and let­ting them con­nect to the net­work, while the deliv­ery net­work auto­mates com­pli­ance with reg­u­la­tion.”

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 fuel-pow­ered deliv­ery cars and trucks.

But there is one major prob­lem.

Will the FAA and EASA reg­u­la­tors be ready for such a major break­through in drone deliv­ery leav­ing aside the basic BVLOS require­ment?

For more infor­ma­tion

https://wing.com/

(News Source: https://www.forbes.com)

(Top image: Wing)

eVTOL Insights is part of the Industry Insights Group. Registered in the UK. Company No: 14395769