Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Domino’s Pizza is testing pizza-delivering drones

By
domicopter-in-action
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Detailed by NBC News recently, Domino’s Pizza hired a creative agency called T + Biscuits to test the feasibility of octocopter drones that deliver a hot, delicious pizza to your doorstep. Heavily branded as the DomiCopter, the current prototype can deliver two, large pizzas in about ten minutes within a four mile radius of the store. While future versions could hypothetically use GPS coordinates to deliver the pie, the existing model is piloted from the ground by someone experienced in drone flight.

domicopter drone delivers pizzaThe DomiCopter has eight spinning blades and includes the standard thermal insulation bag that’s carried around by Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers. Developed by a company called Aerosight, this type of drone is primarily used for capturing broadcast quality video with cameras like the Red Epic , Canon C300 or Sony PMW F3.

Recommended Videos

No flying permits are needed to operate the drone up to 126 meters off the ground; only permission of the landowner is required. Other tools that can be used with the drone include on-board GPS, air pressure sensors and an electronic compass.

When asked about the feasibility of using the DomiCopter drone, T + Biscuits founder Tom Hatton said “If anything, it went quicker than a pizza boy. We were amazed at how easy it was going to be.” Hatton was referencing the time required to navigate roads as well as stop at red lights. According to Hatton, other names previously batted around for the DomiCopter included the “Pepperdroney” and the “Flyin’ Hawaiian.”

After proving the concept with the first drone flight, the DomiCopter has been delivered to Domino’s UK headquarters for further testing. Ideally, the company wants to test increasing the payload capacity of the drone in order to carry other items like a two-liter bottle of Coke or perhaps more pizzas. Domino’s UK management haven’t announced any plans to roll out a test of drone deliveries at Domino’s pizza locations in the United Kingdom or the United States.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Mike Flacy
Mike Flacy
Contributing Editor
By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more