Google Gets In The Food Business, Burrito Delivery Via Drone

Google’s parent company Alphabet is into a lot of things, but the most recent engagement involves a partnership with Chipotle to deliver burritos to customers using drones. That’s right, customers can now get their Chipotle burritos delivered via drones. It’s just too bad that the service is only available to a few people right now.

Retailers have been harping about how drones are the future of deliveries for years now and companies like Amazon are actually trying to make good on that prediction. Now, Alphabet is joining the list of corporations who are doing the same thing by delivering the Mexican food to students at Virginia Tech as part of its Project Wing efforts, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The delivery system is in its test phase, which explains the limited range and numbers of customers that can avail of the service. The delivery itself works with the drones flying from a nearby Chipotle van where the burritos are made and then go to where the students are to pull the burritos from the cranes attached to the flying machines.

The drones themselves were made by the X research lab of Alphabet. These drones have made similar deliveries before, but only to employees of the company. The case with Virginia Tech will be the first time that the drones have made deliveries in an American institution.

In terms of how the flight patterns of the drones are setup, there are automated routes that the drones follow to reach a predetermined destination. The tests will last for a few days, where Alphabet will gather relevant data to find any issues to deal with.

As The Verge notes, one of the biggest obstacles to conducting drone deliveries in the U.S. are the regulations that the FAA have in place. Companies who want to use drones to deliver anything will need to either find a way to do so while still complying with the rules or lobby for these rules to get changed.