Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Walgreens begins testing drone delivery in Texas
Walgreens will begin flying packages by drone to residents in a pair of Texas cities in partnership with Google’s drone-making affiliate, Wing.
The companies said they will begin testing the service next week in the city of Frisco and neighboring Little Elm, two fast-growing communities north of Dallas where road traffic is “probably the biggest complaint we get,” said Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney.
“Every delivery made by drone is taking a delivery vehicle off our roads,” Cheney said.
It will be Wing’s first commercial expansion in the U.S. after years testing the concept in a Virginia town and parts of Australia and Finland. The drone company is a subsidiary of Google’s corporate parent,
Alphabet.
“We’ve gradually moved into denser and denser environments,” said Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications.
Rivals including Amazon, Walmart and UPS have all sought to get drone delivery fleets off the ground but the projects face numerous technical and regulatory challenges. There’s also not much evidence that American consumers have been clamoring for airlifted packages, and many have expressed privacy, safety or nuisance concerns when asked to imagine the noisy machines over their homes.
Walgreens says about 100 store items will be available for air delivery when the service rolls out in Texas in the coming months, including over-the-counter medication, snacks and cosmetics. Store employees will be tasked with taking online orders and then loading the purchased items onto one of a small number of Wing’s 10-pound drones.
The drones are able to navigate autonomously — though a human pilot can also control them remotely — and are powered by two forward propellers on their wings and 12 smaller vertical propellers. A tether releases to drop the package onto a front lawn.
Wing expects most customers to be in the singlefamily homes that dominate the area, though it has delivered to apartment buildings in Europe.
“It’s got very advanced planning and routing capabilities so for each flight, the system does millions of simulations to get the best route,” Bass said. “It can navigate to a very specific location.”