Skip to main content

Wing

See All Stories

Alphabet’s Project Wing plans to deliver burritos by drone in South Eastern Australia

Burrito's delivered by drone - Alphabet’s Project Wing in South Eastern Australia

It has been a little quiet around Alphabet’s Project Wing, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress. Over the last few years, Project Wing has made thousands of test flights and now they are ready to start testing burrito deliveries… again.

The test market is Queanbeyan, South Eastern Australia, where two merchants have signed up for Project Wing. Guzman y Gomez, a Mexican food chain, and Chemist Warehouse, a chain of pharmacies. These companies will receive orders from test consumers, who’ve purchased items using the Project Wing app on their smartphones. Project Wing’s drones will then fly out and make the deliveries.


Expand
Expanding
Close

Google is about to start dropping Chipotle burritos from drones to college students

Site default logo image

project-wing-burrito

Project Wing, a unit of Alphabet, the holding company formerly known as Google, announced today that it will begin delivering Chipotle via Drones to Virginia Tech college students in Blacksburg. You aren’t dreaming. This is real.

My first reaction was checking the calendar (not April 1st) and then lamenting that I grew up in the wrong era. But immediately after that I began wondering if even Google is going to be able to scale this to meet demand…


Expand
Expanding
Close

Google patent points to device for controlling drones with onboard medical equipment

Medical Drones Patent

Drones have become very popular among consumers over the last few years, with various applications mainly in photography and videography, but their potential suggests that there soon could be a slew of additional uses that normal people could benefit from. Particularly, drones could turn out to be very helpful for delivery of physical objects or perhaps an Internet connection.

According to Quartz, a new Google patent filed recently is all about a potential medical use. While last year the idea of medical equipment-carrying drones had already been patented by the search giant, it looks like the company may have found a viable method via which users could contact the devices…


Expand
Expanding
Close

Google’s Project Blackrock sought to bring autonomy to drones w/ computer vision [Video]

Site default logo image

blackrock.mp4 2015-12-17 10-29-53

Many of Google’s internal projects go unannounced for a variety of reasons, but now we’ve uncovered one of them thanks to a year-old video hidden deep in the archive of a Silicon Valley filmmaker’s Vimeo account. Called Project Blackrock, this initiative from Google sought to make quadcopters autonomous with the help of a pair of cameras and a computer…


Expand
Expanding
Close

Google has registered two delivery drones with the FAA for testing over US soil [Updated]

google-x-project-wing-prototypes

Update: A report out of Re/code says that these drones aren’t actually Project Wing drones. They’re rather being registered for the company’s other drone project, Project Titan, which intends to provide internet access to remote or disaster-stricken locations. Google’s Project Titan is not to be confused with Apple’s Project Titan.

A couple of months ago, a report surfaced suggesting that Google was sidestepping FAA regulations by getting special approval from NASA to test its Project Wing delivery drones in the US. Now, it looks like the company (via Engadget) is actually getting approval for at least a couple of drones, as evidenced by a couple of entries in the FAA’s official registry…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google is sidestepping the FAA to test its unmanned drones on US soil

Google is testing its Project Wing unmanned aircrafts, otherwise known as drones, over United States soil with quiet approval by NASA, according to a new report by the Guardian. The technology giant would otherwise have to receive a 333 exemption by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a waiver issued to commercial companies testing the use of UASs (unmanned aircrafts), as the commercial operation of these aircrafts is banned in the United States.


Expand
Expanding
Close

Astro Teller: Google ‘encouraged too much attention’ for Glass, more from SXSW

astro teller

Google’s head of Google[x] Astro Teller took the stage today at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, to talk about the Mountain View company’s secretive experimental lab and the things that the team has learned over years of showing its ambitious projects to the world (via The Verge). Teller spent a lot of time talking about Google Glass—which is definitely one the better known projects to come out of Google[x]—and how this fame was actually part of where Google failed…


Expand
Expanding
Close

Project Wing is Google X’s attempt at a drone-based delivery program

Site default logo image

Earlier this year, Amazon unveiled its plans for using drones to deliver products to customers, and now Google has revealed that it is working on something similar. According to two separate reports from The Atlantic and BBC, the secretive Google X team has been hard at work on Project Wing, a drone-based delivery system, for more than two years.

The idea of Google using drones to deliver goods is something that 9to5Google has reported on for some time now, including as far back as October of 2012, and again a few months later. Google said the following in a statement regarding Project Wing:

Project Wing is a Google[x] project that is developing a delivery system that uses self-flying vehicles. As part of our research, we built a vehicle and traveled to Queensland, Australia for some test flights. There, we successfully delivered a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to a couple of Australian farmers.

We’re only just beginning to develop the technology to make a safe delivery system possible, but we think that there’s tremendous potential to transport goods more quickly, safely and efficiently.


Expand
Expanding
Close