Wing has announced a new operating model called ‘Wing Delivery Network’ enabling drones to autonomously pick up, travel, and drop off.
The Wing Delivery Network consists of three basic hardware elements: delivery drones, ‘Pads’, where drones takeoff, land, and recharge their batteries between trips, and ‘Autoloaders’ that allow Wing’s partners to preload packages for automatic pickup.
Wing’s Autoloader allows its delivery drones to perform curbside pickup on the consumer’s behalf with no additional work for store employees.
Wing Delivery Network’s automation makes it very easy to deploy and maintain. For businesses and other organisations, building drone delivery into the last mile can be as simple as ordering drones, turning them on, and letting them connect to the network.
Wing’s pilots can oversee fleets of autonomous delivery drones to ensure they’re operating safely and efficiently. The Wing Delivery Network can also automate compliance with regulation.
Wing plans to roll out elements of its delivery network capabilities over the next 12 months, with the system capable of handling tens of millions of deliveries for millions of consumers by the middle of 2024 at a lower cost per delivery than ground transportation can achieve for fast delivery of small packages.
The company has been working in recent years to enable its drone delivery to integrate seamlessly with existing delivery infrastructure for restaurants and retailers. Wing has launched delivery services from parking lots and rooftops and has integrated with well-known delivery apps.
All of Wing’s research and commercial operations efforts have been directed toward the development of a logistics platform called the Wing Delivery Network.
The network is a decentralised, automated system that can support high-volume drone delivery across a major metro area or a more sparsely populated region, and is managed by logistics automation software that constantly allocates hardware resources at a city or metro-wide scale.
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