Drones will soon be dropping Chipotle burritos from the skies at Virginia Tech — but only for a limited group of students and staff.
{mosads}Project Wing, the product of an incubation lab under Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced Thursday that it will begin testing food delivery flights at the campus later this month.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given its stamp of approval to the experimental service, which will be the most extensive test of drone deliveries in the U.S. and will help contribute data to the FAA’s ongoing research on the technology.
The hundreds of test flights are seen as a major step forward in eventually using drones for widespread delivery service.
“The commercial use of drones for package and food delivery in U.S. airspace is rapidly becoming a reality,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement. “We are pleased to work with Project Wing and other great partners to leverage Virginia Tech’s tremendous research capacity to capitalize on the tremendous business potential promised by unmanned aircraft systems technology.”
An FAA rule went into effect last month permitting small commercial drone use, but the regulation does not permit flights over people, at nighttime or beyond the visual line of sight, though drone operators can apply for waivers.
The FAA has vowed to propose a rule allowing flights over crowds by the end of this year.
Under the delivery trials at Virginia Tech, a select group of students and employees will be able to order from a special kiosk located in a campus building, and Chipotle will prepare the lunches at a nearby food truck.
An unmanned aircraft system loaded with burritos will then automatically fly over several hundred meters of open ground, hover in the air above the test site and lower the package to the ground.
Project Wing said in a press release that the goal is to test navigation performance, timing accuracy and how well the food endures the journey.
“A lunchtime rush of burrito orders will crank up the operational pressure of multiple orders coming in during a short period of time,” the company said. “Food delivery will help us solve an important set of hard problems quickly — and then it will be a lot easier in the future for us to work with less fragile goods, or handle different kinds of time-sensitive items.”