Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Ltd conducted a demonstration pizza delivery by drone in the New Zealand city of Auckland on Thursday, and afterwards said it aimed to be the first company to launch a regular drone service, late this year.
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New Zealand approved commercial drone delivery previous year, becoming one of the first countries to allow such services, the U.K. Guardian reports.
Drone delivery is a bit more complicated in Canada, where regulations hamper where and who can operate delivery drones. There are limits on how far Domino’s will be able to deliver.
Domino’s introduced a pizza delivery drone in the summer of 2013, and now it is going to start testing actual pizza-by-drone deliveries soon.
Some of the world’s biggest companies including Amazon.com Inc and Google, or Alphabet Inc as it is known, have plans to make deliveries by drone and aviation authorities in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand have been relaxing rules to allow air deliveries.
The Domino’s and 7-Eleven deliveries both used drones provided by USA -headquarted Australian drone company Flirtey. New Zealand’s drone laws now prohibit a drone to fly farther than the device’s operator can see, but Domino’s said it’s working with authorities to bend the rules.
Domino’s has previously shown an interest in alternative delivery services. Assuming Domino’s likes what it sees with this test, it will be carrying out similar tests in half a dozen other places, including the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Japan, and Australia.
The base of the robotic pizza delivery machine was developed by Marathon Targets, a robotics startup that makes equipment for live fire training.
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Marathon and Domino’s Australia are dubbing DRU “the world’s first autonomous pizza delivery vehicle”, but it’s just a prototype for now.
