Drone Delivery: From Air Mail to ABB Robot Hubs

Drone delivery has gone from a stunt to an app option in about a decade. This week DoorDash showed its own delivery aircraft, Lowe's started flying tools to customers near Charlotte, and Amazon, Wing and Zipline are all adding cities. This post follows the idea from the first air mail flights to today's services, then looks at the part nobody films: the ground work of picking, packing and loading each order. That is where ABB robots could fit, and we will say plainly where that is a possibility and where it already happens.

A six rotor delivery drone from Connect Robotics carrying a package in flight, 2016. Photo: Eduardofamendes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From biplane mail bags to the first delivery drones

Moving mail by air is older than most people guess. On 18 February 1911 the French pilot Henri Pequet flew 6,500 letters from Allahabad to Naini in British India, about 13 km, in a Humber-Sommer biplane. The flight took thirteen minutes and was part of an exhibition. In the United States, scheduled Air Mail started on 15 May 1918, when Army pilots flew Curtiss JN-4H biplanes out of the Polo Field in Washington. Every one of those flights needed a pilot, a ground crew and people sorting sacks by hand at both ends.

Officials and Army pilots on the first day of US Air Mail service, 15 May 1918. Photo: Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

The drone version arrived as a promise. In 2013 Jeff Bezos revealed Amazon Prime Air in an interview on 60 Minutes. Google's Project Wing made its first test deliveries in 2014, and pizza chains and startups ran demo flights around the same time. Most of these were short trials under special permission. Regulators had no rules yet for small aircraft flying beyond the operator's line of sight over houses, and the economics were poor. Even in 2022, a single delivery in Amazon's US trials cost at least $484.

An Amazon Prime Air delivery drone with its cargo box on display, 2017. Photo: William Warby / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first service that ran every day came from medicine, far from suburban backyards. Zipline started flying blood to hospitals in Rwanda in 2016, launching small fixed wing aircraft from a catapult and dropping boxes on parachutes. During 2020 and 2021 its drones carried COVID-19 vaccine vials in Ghana with the Ministry of Health. In April 2019 Wing became the first drone company to receive an air operator certificate from the US Federal Aviation Administration, which let it run deliveries as an airline.

A Zipline fixed wing drone just after launch from its catapult, 2018. Photo: Roksenhorn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

DoorDash, Lowe's and the race to fill the sky

The pace picked up in 2026. On 30 September DoorDash unveiled its own aircraft under the name DoorDash Air, a six rotor drone with a winch that lowers orders to the doorstep. Pilot flights will start in Northern California with Chipotle and Popeyes. DoorDash says about 80% of typical restaurant orders are light and small enough to fly. A week earlier Lowe's began a pilot with DoorDash and Wing at its Matthews, North Carolina store, flying orders of about 2.5 pounds within 5 miles in as little as 20 minutes.

A fenced Wing drone delivery launch site in a parking lot, June 2026. Photo: EIS30 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The bigger operators are scaling too. In August CNBC reported that Amazon plans to take Prime Air to nearly 500 cities, and Uber signed with Zipline to add drones to its delivery network. Wing passed one million commercial deliveries by mid 2026, most of them for Walmart. DoorDash's team designed the loading systems, packaging and kitchen handoff first and the aircraft second, because getting an order from a counter into the air is the slow and fiddly part. Our post on sidewalk delivery fleets covers the same problem on the ground.

A Zipline delivery drone on display at an event in 2026. Photo: Tessa Bury / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

That ground work is where ABB fits today, even though ABB does not build delivery drones. In a retail hub or dark store, the Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision and a suction gripper to pick unknown items from mixed bins. An IRB 360 FlexPicker can pack small goods at high speed, and a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can work next to staff at a packing table. We found no source of an ABB robot loading a delivery drone yet, so treat this as a possibility. A cell like that would usually be built and tested first in RobotStudio.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a small ABB arm with a suction gripper above two picking bins. Photo: ABB

Where drone delivery goes from here

For homes, the next few years look like more of the same in more places. Expect drone delivery as one checkbox in apps people already use, covering a few miles around a store or restaurant, with couriers still taking large orders, bad weather days and most apartment buildings. DoorDash's own launch says weather and range will limit which orders fly. Households near a hub will get coffee, medicine or a missing tube of caulk in minutes, while everyone else waits for the van.

A Flytrex team member loads a package into a delivery drone in Iceland, 2017. Photo: HadasBandel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On the factory and warehouse side, the hubs will need the same automation that parcel centres already use. A launch site that sends dozens of flights an hour cannot have one person walking each box to a pad. Mobile robots such as ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs already carry totes and racks around plants without fixed tracks, and a similar job exists between a picking cell and a row of drone docks. How much of that ABB ends up supplying is open; the tasks themselves are familiar from drone manufacturing and parcel work.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

The open problems are noise, safety and cost. Axios reported in August that annoyed neighbours are now a real obstacle, and planned Wing sites at Walmart stores in Maplewood met public opposition. In September a food delivery drone crashed onto Highway 6 in northwest Harris County, near Houston, and in October 2025 two Amazon MK30 drones hit a construction crane in Arizona. Robots in the hubs also need technicians who can program and maintain them, and most stores and restaurants do not have one on staff. The services that make loading cheap and boring will be the ones that spread past a few test towns.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table, the kind of arm that can share a packing station with staff. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com