Shortly after receiving final FAA approval for drone deliveries, Amazon already has a rival. Walmart announced that it will start a pilot program with drone company Flytrex to deliver groceries and other household essentials from its stores in Fayetteville, NC. Flytrex had previously received FAA approval for food deliveries in North Carolina.

The pilot program will mostly be used to gather information for a future service, so the Fayetteville skies won’t be filled with drones just yet. “The drones, which are controlled over the cloud using a smart and easy control dashboard, will help us gain valuable insight into the customer and associate experience — from picking and packing to takeoff and delivery,” said Walmart senior VP Tom Ward.

For months, engineering teams from USPS and NVIDIA have been developing the AI models, which will help USPS read address labels more quickly and effectively. The system starts with high-performance servers powered by NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and deep learning software, which train multiple algorithms. The trained models are then deployed to NVIDIA EGX edge computing systems at nearly 200 USPS facilities.

Delivery and testing of the system will begin this year, and the AI is expected to be fully operational in spring of 2020. While USPS will get an efficiency boost, this is a big win for NVIDIA too. It shows that AI processes are finding more practical uses.

USPS is experimenting with self-driving mail trucks as well. This spring, it signed a contract with San Diego self-driving truck company TuSimple for a two-week pilot. That involved the company’s trucks hauling USPS trailers on five round trips between the postal service’s Phoenix, Arizona and Dallas, Texas distribution centers. USPS is also developing a drone ‘airline’ to deliver medical samples in the US.