Retailer delivers purchases using drones

The announcement sheds a spotlight on the competitive drone delivery market, which includes Walmart, Amazon, Alphabet, and logistics service providers Fedex and UPS, among others. Thanks to the drones, the high delivery costs on the “last mile” should be reduced in the future and households in rural areas should be served more easily. So far, all providers have only been active in relatively small test areas in the USA, but that is now changing.

Delivery via drone is convenient for Walmart customers: For a delivery fee of just under four dollars, they can choose the delivery option “delivery by air” for selected groceries with a total weight of up to 4.5 kilograms. Employees pack the purchases into a package and hang it on the gripper arms of a drone.

This flies within 30 minutes to the delivery address – usually the customer’s garden or a parking lot. The package is then lowered from a height of 25 meters via a cable. The customer must not stand near the drone. The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) prohibits drones from flying over people or cars.

Originally, it was expected that customers would only use air delivery in exceptional situations, says David Guggina, who is responsible for innovation and automation at Walmart. “In the meantime we have learned that they also use (the offer) for pure convenience, for example for a quick dinner on a working day.” In one branch, the product ordered most via drone is the ready meal “Hamburger Helper”.

However, the delivery does not work completely automatically: human pilots from the company Drone Up control the machines, which is required by the FAA. Likewise, drones must always be flown on sight. Walmart has therefore erected nine-meter-high towers in the parking lots of the relevant branches, from which the drone pilots monitor a visual flight of up to 2.5 kilometers away. So the program is staff-intensive – and customers have to live close to the Walmart branch.

Amazon’s drone program has already cost two billion dollars

For Walmart, the expanded drone program is a strategic milestone: The supermarket chain is competing with Amazon in the USA to see who can offer customers faster delivery. Both groups promise deliveries within less than two hours and also deliveries to your own kitchen.

Amazon has also been testing deliveries with drones under the Prime Air name for several years. Unlike Walmart, Amazon’s delivery should one day be fully automated, i.e. without any human pilots. The drones should be able to transport packages of a maximum of around 2.5 kilograms, which would cover 85 percent of orders on Amazon.

But that’s still in the future. In a 2013 interview with CBS, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos raved that Amazon might be using its drones on a large scale in four to five years. The company seems a long way from that even in 2022 – and that, although according to Bloomberg, more than two billion dollars have already flowed into the program and a thousand employees are working on it.

Again and again, breakdowns affect Amazon’s drone program. Last year, a drone on a test flight in rural Oregon crashed, triggering a brush fire that burned more than 100,000 square meters.

Amazon originally wanted to fly its drones closer to the ground to deliver the goods, Wired reports. But that required additional sensors, which would have made the drone heavier. It would have belonged to a different class of drones for which the FAA provides additional regulations.

Alphabet’s subsidiary Wing flies in Virginia and Texas

Google’s parent company Alphabet has also been working on a drone program for ten years, which is now called Wing. In two cities in Australia and one in Finland, the company has been testing its drones in cooperation with supermarkets for a long time.

In the USA, customers in three suburbs in Texas and Virginia have been able to have products from the drugstore chain Walgreens delivered to them with the Wing drone for a few weeks now. As of March 2022, Wing has delivered 200,000 packages so far – groceries, first aid products, but also fast food.

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Unlike Walmart and Amazon, Wing has received an exemption from the FAA and is allowed to fly its drones independently and without visual contact. This allows Wing to deliver its products within a radius of a good six kilometers. Similar to Walmart, once the delivery is complete, the drones end up in the drugstore parking lots, where they are recharged.

Deliveries via drone are not just about increasing convenience for customers, according to the Alphabet subsidiary. Drones offer many benefits to society: “We also want to reduce traffic congestion, accidents and greenhouse gases and increase sales for shops.”

Rain and wind are still obstacles

However, one of the biggest problems for drone deliveries has been and still is the weather. “You can’t fly the drones when it’s windy, you can’t fly them when it’s raining,” complained the CEO of the logistics group UPS, Carol Tomé, at a conference of the American Chamber of Commerce a few months ago. Densely populated cities are also a challenge for drones, because people there could easily be injured by the drones or the packages that land.

For this reason, all providers have so far limited themselves to deliveries in suburban or rural areas. But the experience that companies like Walmart can now gather with their expanded program will help them to further develop drone deliveries.

More: Start-up Jedsy delivers to the balcony by drone.