Google’s drone fleet looks great for delivering burritos, terrible for pizzas

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Drones
With their self-driving cars and crazy balloons that float around delivering Internet access to those hard to reach places on our planet, it was only a matter of time before Google got into the drone business. As it turns out they’ve already got a plan, we just didn’t know about it.
Google has just lifted the curtain on a two-year-old project that aims at using drones to deliver goods, and while it is quite a ways away from being a consumer-focused product it is hard not to get excited about something called Project Wing.
It seems like every other week now we hear about one company or another trying to figure out how they would use remotely controlled or self-guided drones to deliver things. From the TacoCopter to Amazon’s Quadcopter-powered Prime Air concept, the basic idea is the same.
These companies want the ability to deliver goods to consumers in minutes without having to worry about expensive things like cars and people. Google’s offerings are a little different from what we’ve seen so far in this drone-delivery space, and over the last two years the team responsible for the project has developed an impressive road map for the future.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cRTNvWcx9Oo
Instead of landing a quadcopter and releasing a package like all of the other delivery mechanisms we’ve seen
 so far, Project Wing uses a tail sitter design to send an airplane-shaped drone to the skies. This drone doesn’t land at its designation to deliver a package, but instead lowers it to the ground through a retractable tether. Once the payload is deployed, the drone returns home to be recharged and re-loaded. You can see in the video how Google plans to track each drone and the paths they are likely to take, but like the self-driving cars there’s still a ton of work left to do in order to ensure the drones are able to do their thing without issue.
A program like Wind is still years from being used on a regular basis, and even if Google were ready to go today there’s still an ongoing conversation within the governments of the world to determine how drones will be regulated in order to ensure our skies aren’t filled with tiny robots. However, this is an undeniably cool move forward for this tech. Delivery by drone is absolutely something that is going to happen eventually, and it couldn’t be more clear that Google wants in on that action.

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Some say he’s half man half fish, others say he’s more of a seventy/thirty split. Either way he’s a fishy bastard.

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