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Food Delivery by Drone at Virginia Tech

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September 9, 2016

Virginia Tech and aviation start-up Project Wing will this fall test food delivery using unmanned flying vehicles, the university said on Thursday. Virginia Tech is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, an initiative created by colleges, aviation companies and government agencies in Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia working with the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct test flights of unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly known as drones. Project Wing is one of several "moon shots" incubated by X, Google's experimental lab.

The pilot comes hot on the heels of last month's announcement that Xavier University in Ohio would install the country's first pizza-dispensing ATM on campus. Unlike that food-based innovation, which is open around the clock, the pilot at Virginia Tech will take place "at a closed site with a small group of students and employees, and is not open to the public," the university said. Fast food chain Chipotle will reportedly supply the payload.

Carl Straumsheim

Carl Straumsheim, Technology Correspondent, joined Inside Higher Ed in 2013. He got his start in journalism as a video game blogger for Norway's third largest paper, Dagbladet, at age 15, and has since dabbled in media criticism, investigative reporting and political coverage. Straumsheim (pronounced STROMS-hyme) boasts that he once received a perfect score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which enabled him to pursue a bachelor's degree in English from LaGrange College and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland at College Park.