Autonomous drones are now delivering coffee over Switzerland
The delivery drones are coming, and they’re bearing coffee. If you happened to look at the sky over Zurich, Switzerland on Wednesday, you might have seen a drone fly over the city and deliver a hot cup of java onto the roof of a parked Mercedes-Benz van. As TechCrunch reports, the occasion marks the first successful delivery for Matternet , a logistics company focused on drones. For the next three weeks Mattenet will be shuttling coffee by local e-commerce company Siroop over Switzerland’s largest city. It’s not exactly a door-to-door type thing, which means humans aren’t quite out of the equation yet. The vans, provided by Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler, serve as helicopter landing pads of sorts for the drones. The drones fly autonomously for the most part, but the specially made vans guide them in through GPS for greater precision on the last stretches of the journey. Once they land on the van’s roof, a person handles the actual delivery of the coffee to the door. It ...