Hungry Virginia Tech students will soon be able to order drone-delivered Chipotle burritos

By Ed Oswald Published September 12, 2016

Google parent company Alphabet is looking to test out some of its drone technologies, and is turning to Chipotle to do it. The company will test out drone-based home delivery of the semi-fast food chain’s meals to the 30,000-plus students on Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus.

Over a period of several weeks, the Project Wing division of Alphabet will offer delivery from Chipotle’s on-campus food truck to wherever the ordering student is, presumably through the use of an app. When it finds the student who has ordered the burrito, the food will be lowered using a winch.

Recommended Videos

Neither Alphabet or Chipotle are guaranteeing at this point that the service may work: the packaging could come apart, the burrito might be cool, or the winch may plop that burrito right on your head instead of your hands for example. The goal here is testing accuracy, durability, and feasibility, and Virginia Tech’s hungry students are the guinea pigs.

Alphabet’s test has received FAA approval, and there are a few things that Project Wing will need to do in order to comply with current drone laws. While the burrito-delivering drones will be automated, trained human pilots will be on standby to take control of the drone if needed. Regulations also forbid drones from flying directly over people, so any participants will be “shielded.”

While all of this may sound like a simple test, Project Wing says it’s much more complex that it looks. First off, how to fly drones in what could become ever-increasingly busy skies is one thing that will be tested during deliveries. The FAA will also monitor the test, possibly using what Project Wing finds in development of regulations surrounding the topic.

Also, it sounds like the test won’t be open to just anybody (likely due to that “no guarantees” warning referenced earlier). The director of the partnership, Mark Blanks, told Bloomberg that participants will be “a mix of Virginia Tech employees, students, and possibly other recruits.” Either way, it is the most complex test of drone delivery so far.

Let’s hope it’s successful, because the idea of drone-delivered Chipotle just sounds awesome.

Topics

Contributor

For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…

Computing

Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot

Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search.

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform.

Cars

Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles

rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Cars

Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs

Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.