The project will be launched on a pilot basis from Delhi-NCR and Chandigarh in March this year. It will cut door-to-door delivery time by one-third, says Zomato.
NEW DELHI: A pioneer in introducing drone technology for services in India, food delivery app Zomato will soon deliver food at your doorstep with the help of drones. This was revealed by Zomato at the Global Aviation Summit held here earlier this week.
To start with, Zomato would launch this ambitious project on a pilot basis from Delhi NCR and Chandigarh sometime in March this year, and the food delivery app-based company believes that this would cut the door-to-door delivery time by one-third.
According to Zomato, currently, it takes about 30-35 minutes on an average to deliver food from the restaurant to the customers’ addresses by their riders and this delivery time would be reduced to 10-12 minutes (door-door) once the drone service starts.
A Zomato spokesperson told this correspondent: “We have decided to be a pioneer in this technology as drone is the technology of tomorrow. We will launch this ambitious project on a pilot basis in Delhi-NCR first, followed by Chandigarh. Once this is in place and working, we expect to cut down on our delivery time drastically as human intervention, traffic and other road blocks will be eliminated. This would be a game-changer and we at Zomato are very excited about this.”
Zomato is working on devising a hub-to-hub delivery network, which means that a hub or a drone port will be made near a cluster of restaurants for drones to take off and land, while another hub would be created near a cluster of houses or housing societies for the drones to land, while the last mile delivery will be done by their own delivery executives.
“We are in the process of identifying residential and restaurant hubs, and we have already identified some. We are currently working to develop the kind of infrastructure that would be needed around that,” the Zomato spokesperson said.
Currently, Zomato has some 10-15 Multirotor BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) drones that can carry a payload of 5 kg for a distance of 10 km straight with the DAA (Detect And Avoidance) and Deconfliction system put in place to avoid any collision with birds or other drones at a 50 metre distance. It will be working on a 5G network with GPS tracker in-built. The drone can withstand a wind speed of 20 km per hour.
Vikram Singh Meena, Tech executive Zomato, told The Sunday Guardian, “We are also working to develop a bigger size of Multirotor drone which will be 1,100 cm in diameter. We are also working on hybrid models which would be a mix of both fixed wing and rotory wing clubbed together to get more endurance, and reduce flight time. This is currently in the research and development phase. However, for now, we will start operating with the smaller ones with a payload of 5 kg that can cover a distance of 10 km.”