Move over FedEx and UPS, Google X paves the technological way that can potentially change how things are delivered in the future. Last month, Google X, the search engine giant’s research lab behind projects such as Google Glass, the self-driving car, unveiled Project Wing, a drone-based delivery system that aims to dispatch goods faster than any modern delivery service can dream of.
The project started out as an attempt to solve medical emergencies, by airlifting and sending out defibrillators and medical supplies but they quickly realised that the system could be adopted more broadly. Fancy a rock glass of whiskey while you’re out camping in the woods? Well, Project Wing is bringing that reality a lot closer to us.
“What excited us from the beginning was that if the right thing could find anybody just in the moment that they need it, the world might be a radically better pace,” Astrol Teller, director of Google X, told The Atlantic.
The Project Wing team has been conducting pilot tests in the Australian outback for the past couple of years, successfully delivering several payloads, from candy bars to farm animal medication; quirky payloads with promising results. However, despite its success, Google stresses that the Project Wing craft is still far from the reflection of the final product. A range of models are currently being explored for different payloads, locations and weather conditions.
While we can see how the craft would work in the Australian outback with its large landing spaces and lack of high-rise obstacles, we’re curious to see how it would fare in a metropolitan city such as our well-stacked island. A self-navigating drone that can dodge high-rise apartment blocks and locate the correct apartment in a jungle of 15-storey high buildings to deliver to; now that would be impressive.
