Drones delivering Chipotle, a student’s dream come true. Recently, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Chipotle Mexican Grill and the Blacksburg Virginia Tech University agreed to allow Google’s “Project wing” drones to be tested in certain places on the Virginia tech campus. Sadly, it is in a confined place, so you can not order these burritos from any old place on campus. They have to be ordered from a kiosk on campus grounds. Your order is placed on the kiosk, and sent to a food truck that’s nearby. The drone will take your food, and bring it to the kiosk. Part of the experiment allows the companies to test different ways of packaging the food, to keep it as warm as possible when it reaches you.
Project Wing was created by Google; its goal is to create a drone that can be put to commercial use by delivering anything from regular consumer goods, to emergency medicine. The plan is to have these drones fly predesignated routes, but to program them to detect and avoid obstacles in real time, including other drones that might be delivering at the same time. They have also put a lot of work into a shared airspace system, so that other commercial groups can utilize the same airspace, along with other people such as hobbyists. Outside of their goals, we do not know too much about Google’s Project wing, as they have not shown much.
I asked a few students what they thought of this, and if this sort of thing moved here to the Bay area, would they use it, and would it be useful?
A student named Oscar Castillo thinks it would be a good idea, when I asked him about it he said, “yeah, I think it’d be a good idea”. Another student by the name of Michael Reynolds had this to say, “it’s a lot more convenient for me, and I think I would find something like this really useful, it’s faster, and costs less.” Seeing this, it seems that a majority of students would like to see this come to the bay area. But why have we not seen this yet? One of the main reasons that we do not see Project wing here is that Google needs permission to fly these drones in public, without permission, they are not allowed to, and must continue to test their drones on private property.
A drone delivery service like this could affect the way we do things here at Wilcox. Our deliveries would become much faster, they would produce less smog than a truck delivering products, and they would not have to deal with the traffic that our deliveries go through now. It would not require gas to fuel our drones, so they would be more cost effective. It would also eliminate the need for a driver, and open up a job watching over all these drones, almost like an air tower monitor. This opens up new opportunities for us here at Wilcox, and makes it easier to get our food. A win-win situation.