Wing’s Drone Delivery Game Changer: How Curbside Pickup is Revolutionizing the Future!

Of many ways, drone delivery still feels like pie in the sky in terms of scalable e-commerce. However, in smaller, more controlled pockets, the concept works like a charm. Among the locations is a small Google satellite campus in the Palo Alto foothills. The buildings, which adjoin the larger offices of Tesla and HP, house a handful of Google divisions, including Nest and Wing (an accidental topic, one would imagine).

Fixed-wing drones are a regular sight in the small airspace, courtesy of the latter. The front parking lot quickly becomes a launch pad for testing these systems and various related mechanisms. Wing launched a handful of its delivery planes when paid a visit to the company this weekin part to demonstrate their new system.

Parking lots are an ideal launching pad in a rural area, assuming you can block them from cars. They are ubiquitous and offer an unobstructed path for vertical takeoffs. As such, it’s no surprise that they’ve become the foundation of the company’s approach to bringing delivery to dense suburban areas.

It’s a market the young company has been focusing on for some time. I have long suggested that the ideal application for these technologies is more rural areas and places with insufficient travel infrastructure. It makes a lot of sense for emergency deliveries in places with impenetrable roads.

“My belief on this is that delivery will always require a lot of different offers, in the same way that if you show up at an airport, there are short-haul flights and there are long-haul flights and there are planes designed to take 300 people to across an ocean,” CEO Adam Woodworth tells me as we watch the team prepare for launch. “The market segment in which we focus the most is the dense suburban, approaching the rural. There is an immense amount of demand there. That’s where people get the kind of order numbers that have skyrocketed during the pandemic.”

The pandemic also saw the rise of curbside pickup. As many establishments temporarily closed and consumers continued to fear exposure, it became a quick and easy middle ground between online and in-store shopping. While it largely seemed temporary, many stores have kept up with what has proven to be a popular option, particularly in suburban markets.

The prevalence allowed Wing to rethink an approach that previously relied on an employee being present to handover the drone.

“The original idea for this was: Could you bolt it to the [curbside pickup] sign?” says Woodworth. “The opportunity exists with the existing workflow. How can you make the plane work like a car going up? How do you get the plane to pick up the box, instead of having it Does anyone have to sync it there? It took a long time to get a robust mechanical solution that didn’t require more electronics.”

Despite the name, the AutoLoader is a completely passive system. It stands approximately four feet tall, not including the two PVC pipes that stick out of the front like a pair of horns. The operation is simple. Once the order is placed, an employee packages it in a cardboard box with a plastic ring on top that looks rather like a Happy Meal. Loading into the deck is simple: put the two pegs into the AutoLoader through a couple of holes in the case.

As the drone passes by, it hovers over the AutoLoader for a moment, to assess the situation and make sure everything looks good. If you find a problem that you can’t fix (say the clerk forgot to upload the package), you’ll come back to the center. One drawback of the fully passive system is that it cannot alert the drone or operate on possible problems.

If everything looks good, the drone lowers a string, while the two poles ensure that it doesn’t stray too far from the target. Once the strap is properly positioned under the box, it begins to retract, lifting the payload up like a fishing line and pulling it along for the ride. Once the drone arrives at the pick-up point determined by customers, it gently lowers the box to the ground. This area should be approximately six by six feet, with no foliage to obscure the area.

Of course, the length of the Wing building is significantly shorter than the journey these drones will take in the wild, but things worked out perfectly on the first demo. The Wing rep opened the box and I helped myself to the banana inside, thus spoiling my lunch. It suddenly occurred to me that there was an even better way to test the load. I asked one of the Wing staff for a soft drink.

The drone repeated the trip (although the details of its approach are somewhat random) and lowered the payload. The Wing employee opened the box, grabbed the Coca-Cola bottle inside, and removed the cap. There was no explosive foam, a definitely positive sign. He had a drink for posterity.

“Hopefully, by the end of the year, we will implement them in parts of our operation,” says Woodworth. “And then by the middle of next year, the entire delivery network will have them.”

Wing does not give details on the number of drones currently in operation. Instead, the company quantifies growth by the number of deliveries it has outright. It has made more than 340,000 of those, and says it has built “thousands” of drones in its lifetime. Australia makes up the majority of their shipments, followed by the US, with Europe a distant third.