8, 2016, photo, shows the marquis signs for the Chipotle restaurant in Pittsburgh’s Market Square. The drone is specially designed for utility asset inspections. The aircraft will fly the burritos to a pickup area, then lower them to the ground.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Google parent Alphabet Inc. will test drone delivery by dropping Chipotle burritos to students and staff at Virginia Tech as part of a limited test.
“This month (September) we’ll run hundreds of flights and deliveries at an FAA-sanctioned test site in Virginia where testers will be able to order their lunch [prepared by Chipotle on site in a food truck] from our aircraft over a period of several days”.
The burritos will first be assembled at a food truck, following which they will be loaded on the drone.
Seamless will soon seem less (sorry) when Google and Chipotle flawless the future of food delivery: burrito-delivery drones.
The flights will take place at an undisclosed site on Virginia Tech property, but not at the main campus in Blacksburg, said Mark Blanks, director of Virginia Tech’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership.
Project Wing spokeswoman Jacquelyn Miller said last week that the experiments would be closed to the public and media.
It will just be burritos, though.
This will be one of the first tests of a commercial drone delivery service in the United States. The company says it plans to test how well the food is delivered, while the data gathered could also help guide future FAA regulations as delivery drones become more popular. Several are now testing them, including online seller Amazon.com Inc.
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The food delivery testing will be Project Wing’s first tests involving external users in the USA, and its first collaboration with an FAA-approved unmanned aircraft test site.
