Some residents of the Arlington area will receive food deliveries via an electric drone or four-wheeled robot as part of a pilot project beginning this fall.
Arlington and its partners will make 300 deliveries of supplies from the Tarrant Area Food Bank across two two-week demonstration periods using an Aerialoop drone and Clevon autonomous vehicle, which is smaller than a car. The project, funded by a $780,000 Department of Energy grant and around $820,000 from partners, is the first step toward determining the viability of autonomous delivery of critical goods like food and medicine on a larger scale.
“We have 8.2 million residents within the Dallas-Fort Worth region and we’re growing at a million people every seven years,” said Michael Morris, director of the Regional Transportation Council at the North Central Texas Council of Governments. “We have to eliminate food deserts. We have to create an opportunity to deliver medicine when our children are very ill and we can’t even get out of the house to get them. We’ve got to be able to get access to medicine when we’re dealing with situations like COVID and other types of initiatives.
“Technology is delivering real solutions to real problems.”
Tarrant Area Food Bank already makes deliveries to residents with mobility issues or who lack transportation, but have requests for more than they can currently serve via delivery.
“We can only serve so many people with the limited logistics that we have and adding this additional resource helps us do that,” said home deliveries coordinator Sasha Kehoe.
The project will target those residents and determine which are the best candidates to test autonomous delivery based on logistics.
Making autonomous electric deliveries would reduce traffic and emissions along with addressing logistics challenges, project partners said during a demonstration event Wednesday.
The University of Texas at Arlington will assess risk using modeling and conduct surveys to determine the community response to the project. The end goal is to produce a final report with lessons learned, policy recommendations and a scale-up plan.
