The program kicks off this quarter (that is, no later than March). Waymo had already grown its AutoNation deal to include a car part delivery test in 2019. UPS has been busy, too, having just ordered 10,000 electric trucks from Arrival for crewed deliveries.

The two see this as part of a “long-term plan” to explore how they can cooperate. There’s no guarantee that will involve a self-driving courier rolling up to your door, but that wouldn’t be surprising when UPS is already using drones to deliver medicine. For now, the benefits are more modest. UPS sees this moving packages out of stores more frequently, increasing the chances that your package will reach its destination on time and freeing up space in the stores themselves.

The courier firm already has some experience delivering medical products thanks to its WakeMed partnership, which sees it delivering medical samples across WakeMed’s campus. This is far more ambitious, of course. UPS would be flying over residential areas and deliver a much wider range of products.

There’s a strong incentive to move quickly. Wing’s deal could give FedEx an early edge in the fledgling courier drone space — this prevents a rival from gaining too much technological ground. CVS no doubt wants to counter Walgreens as well. And then there’s pure bragging rights. This positions both UPS and CVS as tech-savvy companies, even if it could take a long time before a robotic aircraft delivers your medication.

Flight Forward is the first company to claim the Part 135 Standard certification, and it’ll be able to operate an unlimited number of drones. The machines and their payloads can weigh more than 55 pounds and UPS can fly its drones at night.

Earlier this year, under the Transportation Department’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program, Flight Forward started transporting medical lab samples and blood for transfusions around WakeMed’s healthcare campus in Raleigh, North Carolina. After it received the FAA certification, it launched a Matternet M2 quadcopter flight under a “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLOS) exemption, which it says was “a first in the US for a regular revenue-generating delivery.”

At first, UPS plans to expand drone deliveries to hospitals and medical campuses across the US. It’s also planning to carry out flights outside of the healthcare industry, “including the transport of special commodities and other regulated goods.”

It aims to build a centralized operations center, run regular BVLOS flights and work with manufacturers to build drones that can carry various capacities of cargo. UPS also plans to quickly build out ground-based, detect-and-avoid technologies for safety and to expand its service in the future.

“This is history in the making, and we aren’t done yet,” UPS CEO David Abney said in a statement. “Our technology is opening doors for UPS and solving problems in unique ways for our customers. We will soon announce other steps to build out our infrastructure, expand services for healthcare customers and put drones to new uses in the future.”

“We are excited to reach this milestone, and look forward to continuing to advance this technology for our customers,” said Scott Drennan, vice president of Bell’s Innovation team. The company will be testing the APT 70 for the rest of the year. Following that trial period, it plans to use the vehicle to conduct demonstrations — both in and out of controlled airspace — through a systems integration and operationalization contract it won with NASA.

Last year, the Fort Worth-based aerospace company began testing the APT 20, a smaller version of the APT 70 with a payload capacity of 20 pounds. Both vehicles are fully autonomous. In other words, they take off and land vertically and transition to forward flight while mid-air.

We’re still a long way from delivery drone package delivery being an option for everyday consumers, but some headway has been made this year. UPS is in the midst of FAA approval for its own commercial delivery drone system. Back in April, the FAA certified the Alphabet-owned Wing to deliver goods in the US. Amazon this summer unveiled a helicopter-airplane hybrid to be used in an upcoming Prime Air delivery service.

Bell has also teamed up with Yamato, a Japanese logistics company, to integrate its package handling system. The demonstration today displayed their systems side by side. Both companies hope to enter into service sometime in the early 2020s.

The demand for local warehouses to speed up those orders also has an effect, Carnegie Mellon’s Costa Samaras said. Those buildings need power, heat and cooling, and that means more emissions.

This doesn’t mean you’ll have to permanently settle on slow deliveries if you want to be kind to the planet, but it may be a while before emissions are less of an issue. Courier companies are gradually switching to hybrid and electric delivery trucks that improve their side of the equation, while the rise of delivery drones could also help. However, the data suggests that efforts to pursue carbon-neutral shipping are not only necessary, but might not be going far enough to catch up with increasing demand.

This isn’t the flexible drone delivery service you might have imagined. Drones will fly along fixed routes, with a trained Remote Pilot-in-Command keeping watch over the trip. It’s part of the FAA’s larger pilot program testing public-private partnerships involving drones, and involves the help of the FAA as well as North Carolina’s Department of Transportation.

It’s a modest start, but it should expand over time. UPS and Matternet both plan to use the Raleigh network to see how drones can be used at other medical facilities around the US. If this goes smoothly, you could easily see other hospitals using drones on a regular basis.