By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill
Eighteen lightweight UAVs sit on takeoff pads in the parking lot of a Walmart store in northwest Houston, ready to be launched on delivery missions. One of the drones takes off vertically and hovers just above the lot while a worker attaches a package to a tether suspended from the UAV.
The drone climbs to its cruising altitude of between 150 and 200 feet before switching to horizontal flight to zoom at 60 mph across the clear Texas skies to make the first delivery in the region, as part of a year-long expansion of drone delivery services provided by Walmart and its logistics delivery partner Wing.
The delivery capped off an ribbon-cutting event marking the first phase of the ambitious planned expansion in which the partners hope to add 150 store locations mostly across the southern United States, reaching an addition 40 million potential customers over the next year.
“We’re just incredibly excited and grateful for the great partnership with Walmart and really excited to get to more of the country as quickly as possible,” Heather Rivera, Wing’s chief business officer, said in an interview with DroneLife.
Together, Wing and Walmart currently conduct drone deliveries across dozens of sites in the U.S. with its operations largely focused on the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and, most recently, Metropolitan Atlanta.
To date, the partnership has achieved hundreds of thousands of drone delivery missions, Rivera said. Through its service in the DFW and Atlanta regions combined, Walmart and Wing complete about 1,000 deliveries every day, she said.
“Our consumers there are really enjoying the service. We’ve seen that our most frequent drone orderers are coming back and ordering three times a week.”
She said through their drone delivery business, the partners are not only serving customers’ need for fast and convenient delivery service, “but I think we’re also unlocking latent demand for people to use the service in ways that they couldn’t have even comprehended or contemplated before.”
Constructed with durable foam material, the electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles each weight about 11 pounds without a payload. Wing has spent about a decade designing the vehicles to be not only lightweight, but rugged and capable of flying under a variety of weather conditions.
The drone delivery routes are planned partially through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help the vehicles to fly autonomously to their destinations.
“We’re able to do monitoring beyond the visual line of sight. We do have pilots who help with the drones, but they’re not monitoring the flight pattern of a specific drone,” Rivera said. The remote pilots, located in Dallas, are able to provide oversight over large areas in which a number of drones are active.
The drones are equipped with ADS-B receivers, which allow them to detect and avoid manned aircraft that might be sharing the airspace with them. They’re also built with multiple safety redundancy features, such as having several propellers to where if one fails the others can continue to provide the lift needed to help the vehicle complete the mission.
In addition, the UAVs use visual AI tools that allow the drones to avoid obstacles in the delivery zones, such as vehicles or lawn chairs that might interfere with the drone safely lowering its. This technology allows the drone to “nudge” its way around the obstacle, or if there is no way to safely avoid the obstacle in the drop zone, the aircraft will be directed to return to its home base without making the delivery.
Houston among first cities sited for service expansion
The Walmart in northwest Houston was one of five delivery hubs the partners launched in the greater Houston area. Other locations include stores in the nearby communities of Crosby and Kemah and two in the city of Katy, west of Houston.
Greg Chathey, Walmart senior vice president for digital fulfillment transformation, said the retail giant also plans to open up additional drone delivery nests at other locations in the Houston area in the coming weeks.
“We’re just getting started with the five that we have,” he said. The company has several criteria for selecting a store to serve as a drone nest site, and the five Houston-area sites meet those criteria.
“The first is, do the customers want the service? And overwhelmingly Houston is wanting this service and is asking for the service,” he said. “The second thing is we look at weather and where are the weather patterns going to be more beneficial for flying?”
Walmart officials also look at the willingness of local officials to accept the introduction of new technological innovations in their area. And lastly, the retailer looks at the number of stores in has established within any given area, which fit all the other criteria.
“We have an amazing store footprint here in Houston, so it’s very beneficial for us,” Chathey said.
Walmart has previously announced that Houston is one of five U.S. cities that it has selected for drone service expansion in the near term, the others being Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa and Orlando. With its plans to open 150 new drone delivery locations in 2026, the company will feature coast-to-coast service.
Although the bulk of the cities slated for inclusion are located in the southern U.S., Chathey indicated that among the cities set for the next wave of UAV service expansion are St. Louis and Cincinnati.
“We see this as a nationwide program,” he said. “One of the things that we look at is where weather is more beneficial to flying. Obviously, the southern United States fits that bill, but Cincinnati is a much colder climate also, and St. Louis is as well.”
He added that as drone technology continues to evolve and UAVs become more weather-resilient, Walmart hopes to expand its service to more cities in the northern U.S.
“And every day we’re making strides in terms of expanding our operational hours, thinking about where else we can fly,” he said.
Read More
Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
