Swiggy to pilot drone-based deliveries for its grocery service Instamart

Bengaluru: Online food-delivery major Swiggy said it will pilot the use of drones for its instant grocery service, Instamart, starting May. The company will use drones to replenish stocks between dark stores— from the seller’s location to the common point closest to the customer’s delivery address—essentially completing what it calls the middle-delivery layer. Dark store is a small fulfilment centre used to facilitate ultra- fast deliveries.

The final deliveries will be made by its onground fleet Swiggy clarified, in a
blogpost Friday.

The pilots are expected to take place first in Bengaluru and Delhi NCR (national capital region).

“The pilot is to evaluate the feasibility of drones for the middle mile use case, particularly for Swiggy’s grocery delivery service Instamart. Drones will be used to replenish stocks between seller-run dark stores and from a store to a common customer point. A delivery partner will then pick up orders from the common point and deliver them to the customer’s doorstep,” the company explained in the blogpost.

Swiggy has selected – Garuda Aerospace, Skyeair Mobility, the consortia between ANRA Technologies and TechEagle, as well as Marut Dronetech– for the pilots.

Garuda Aerospace in Bengaluru and Skyeair Mobility in Delhi and NCR will start the pilots immediately.

In the second tranche, ANRA and TechEagle consortia along with Marut Dronetech will commence and work on the plots after collating the learnings from the first tranche. ETtech reported on June 16, 2021 that an ANRA Technologies-led consortium, of which
Swiggy is a part, had received clearance from government authorities to commence
drone trials for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations in India.

The pilot will commence in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR with Garuda Aerospace and Skyeair Mobility. Based on the progress, expansion will take place in the region and beyond.

“ This is an exciting and challenging journey. We look forward to working with our partners and using the findings from these pilots as the stepping stone in unearthing possibilities for drone-assisted deliveries in the e-commerce space,” said Swiggy in the blogspot.

As a part of the process, Swiggy said that it received registrations from 345 players for its request for proposal (RFP) for the drone delivery service.

“After an extensive evaluation process covering legal, financial, and technical rounds, we finalised the award of the RFP … We have finalised four vendors in two tranches who have a mix of capabilities in drone hardware, potential to scale up, investment in innovation, research and development, and the overall ability to deliver the service,” Swiggy added.

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