Walmart will lead the drone delivery market! Covering 4 million American households in 2022!

Walmart announced that it will expand the number of stores that provide drone delivery services. In 2022, Walmart plans to launch DroneUp drone delivery services for online order packages for 4 million households in six states in the United States, covering 34 cities in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah and Virginia. Each drone can deliver more than 1 million packages per year.

How does Walmart's drone delivery service work?

Walmart said customers who live near drone-friendly stores will be able to order items weighing less than 10 pounds between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Delivery will cost $3.99 and will be made by drones from a company Walmart is working with, DroneUp.

Walmart store staff receive the order, put it in a box, and then attach the box to the drone. The pilot then flies the drone to the customer and uses what looks like a giant claw to drop the package on the lawn.

It is reported that Walmart is not only trying to expand the delivery coverage of the plan, but also hopes to increase the number of package deliveries through drones. Walmart said that it has completed hundreds of delivery tasks in a few months.

Walmart will lead the drone market

With this planned expansion, Walmart could take the lead in commercial drone delivery in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reported that while companies like FedEx and UPS are also researching drone delivery, they are currently only in the trial stage, not the "service provision" stage.

Meanwhile, Google's parent company Alphabet also operates a drone delivery service called Wing in Texas and Virginia, which has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages around the world, but has not yet announced any further expansion plans.

And of course there is Amazon, which has been working on a drone delivery service for years. Although Amazon conducted a drone delivery pilot in the UK in 2016, it is not currently using drones to deliver packages, and it is unclear whether the project will accelerate.

Unmanned delivery has some limitations

However, as Ars Technica points out, Walmart's drone delivery system has some limitations. US law requires line of sight when flying drones, which means that store parking lots must have a control tower to provide drone services. This restriction also means that drone delivery services can only deliver within a 1.5-mile radius of the store.

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