"Guzman y Gomez, a Mexican food chain, and Chemist Warehouse, a chain of pharmacies, will receive orders from our testers who've purchased items using the Project Wing app on their smartphones," James Ryan Burgess, co-lead of Project Wing, said in a release Monday. "We'll dispatch our drones to pick up the order from our partners' loading sites and then transport and deliver the goods to testers at their residences."
The tests are being conducted in a rural community near the national capital, Canberra, where consumers are typically forced to take a "40-minute round trip in the car for almost anything, whether it's a carton of milk, veggies for dinner, or a cup of coffee," Burgess said.
"They wanted fresh meals delivered at dinner time. Some who run small businesses at home wanted to be able to send customer orders from their doorstep," he said.
Alphabet previously tested burrito deliveries by drone in Virginia along with Chipotle and researchers from Virginia Tech, but those tests occurred "in an open field, not to a specific address or location" like the tests being conducted in Australia.
"The information we gather from both of these test partners will help us build a system so that merchants of all kinds can focus on what they're good at - like making food or helping people feel healthier - rather than being distracted by complex delivery logistics," Burgess said.
