Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (NYSE:CMG) will be testing burrito delivery at Virginia Tech using Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG,GOOGL) drones.
The drones being used by Chipotle will come from the Project Wing effort taking place inside of the Google X lab, which is where the company tests out several new ideas. The drones won’t have a pilot and they’ll use a tether to lower burritos to students.
The test is being done to see how well the Google drones manage when being given fragile packages for delivery. The deliveries will only be made at a certain part of the campus. This location will be a few hundred meters away from a Chipotle truck, which is where employees will make the burritos for delivery.
“Last year while discussing the entrepreneurial spirit at Virginia Tech, I jokingly speculated we might one day have quadcopters delivering ramen noodles around campus — apparently I wasn’t off by much,” Tim Sands, President of Virginia Tech told CNNMoney.
The drones aren’t completely on their own for deliveries. Each one will be monitored by a pilot that can take over should anything go wrong. Mark Blanks, the director of the delivery program, said that it’s the “most complex delivery flight operation” that he knows of taking place in the United States.
Sands also said that setting up the drone test with Google an Chipotle wasn’t easy. He noted that there were a lot of safety protocols and policies that had to be sorted out before it could start. However, he said Virginia Tech chose to take part so it could be involved in the next generation of transportation technology, reports New York Daily News.
