Leading drone delivery company Wing is pushing ahead with plans to considerably scale its aerial activity through intensified testing of its craft in the kinds of challenging weather conditions the entire sector will have to overcome if it’s to become a true challenger to legacy road transportation.
Alphabet-owned Wing says it has intensified its work to enable drone operation in inclement or even hostile weather as part of a continued drive to establish UAV delivery as both a common and expanding service. In doing so, its experts have been putting company craft through tests involving frigid and sweltering temperatures, as well as punishing wind and rain.
Those moves come in the wake of Wing’s unveiling last month of a dramatically re-conceptualized strategy and hardware approach for drone delivery covering wider areas. Those include docking and charging stations permitting decentralized operation of multi-destination UAVs that previously had been limited to point-to-point activity.
Read more: Wing Delivery Network frees drones from point-to-point operation for faster, flexible service
According to Wing’s head of marketing and communications Jonathan Bass, one of the keys to success for both the company and wider sector will be ensuring drones can answering customer demand in tasking weather conditions that ground delivery vehicles do – at times as part of a multi-modal team.
Indeed, car and truck companies like Ford and Renault are already working on specialized delivery platforms – including drones – that will combine various vehicles to permit the most effective form of last-mile transportation according to different situations.
“We expect drone delivery to be an option in a multi-modal delivery environment along with cars, trucks and other vehicles, and our aim is to be able to operate in nearly any conditions a car can drive in,” said Bass, “We routinely fly on windy and rainy days. We have designed the aircraft to operate in most weather we encounter at this point.”
Read more: Ford plans last-mile delivery drones docking in cargo trucks
In its more recent testing, Wing has flown its drones in windy and rainy conditions, as well as the cold climes of Alaska and northern Finland and the summer heat of Texas.
Yet those more challenging trial environments in many ways draw on experience Wing previously obtained operating drone delivery in places as different as Australia, Finland, Dallas, and new test locales in Ireland and Switzerland.
In providing a sneak peek into its work into enhanced drone performance amid difficult weather, Wing offers a clue of how it plans to rapidly multiply its current 300,000 delivery mark by increasing the kinds of environments its craft can withstand while at work.
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