This week, two companies announced they are moving forward with aerial drone delivery services. On Thursday, the Alphabet-owned drone company Wing launched its first commercial delivery flights in Dallas, Texas. Its drones will remain positioned at strategic Walgreens stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, ready to buzz off to nearby homes with health products in their grip. The drones will eventually also deliver pet medicines and Blue Bell Creameries' ice cream. FedEx also announced that it has partnered with the California company Elroy Air to develop its own delivery drone service.

Tech companies, retailers and real-estate firms working on ways to alleviate the strain of constant delivery on urban environments envision an alternate scenario: skies filled with zipping delivery drones and floating dirigible warehouses, streets and sidewalks teeming with as many robots as people, familiar storefronts serving as automated stockrooms for online fulfillment. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. The e-commerce process, from order to fulfillment, will gradually move toward total automation, says David Wilson, chief executive of machinery company Columbus McKinnon, which uses robotic components in warehouse lifting equipment. "The vehicle that pulls up is an autonomously driven vehicle. The unpacking is done with vision technology and robotic equipment. The movement of equipment to automated storage and retrieval systems is done via mobile robots," Mr. Wilson says, describing the warehouse of the future.

Consider an alternative history for the war in Ukraine. Intrepid Ukrainian Army units mount an effort to pick off Russian supply convoys. But rather than rely on sporadic air cover, the Russian convoys travel under a blanket of cheap drones. The armed drones carry relatively simple artificial intelligence (AI) that can identify human forms and target them with missiles. The tactic claims many innocent civilians, as the drones kill nearly anyone close enough to the convoys to threaten them with anti-tank weapons.

Products delivered through other Wing customers, including ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries, first-aid kits from Texas Health Resources and pet prescriptions from easyvet veterinary clinics, will be handled at a staging area at a mixed-use development in Frisco, Texas, by Wing employees. Over time, Wing plans to have customers operate their own drone deliveries. Wing said deliveries will be limited to "tens of thousands of suburban homes" in Frisco and Little Elm for now. "This third-party delivery model will give businesses the ability to reach their customers in faster and cheaper ways than ever before," said Alexa Dennett, head of communications for Wing. Wing also operates commercial drone services in Christiansburg, Va., Finland and Australia.

Wing this morning announced that it is adding Texas to its list of drone delivery markets. On April 7, the Alphabet-owned operation will be arriving in Frisco and Little Elm, a pair of towns in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. The primary partner is Walgreens, where drones will be picking up health and wellness products. Also on the list is easyvet for pet meds, Texas Health, which provides first aid kits, and Blue Bell Creameries, which is dropping off ice cream as summer looms. Upon launch, the offerings will be available to select customers via invite.

We then define abstract actions that correspond to control inputs that cause transitions between these regions. Due to the noise, every action has multiple possible outcomes that all occur with a certain probability. We compute lower and upper bounds (intervals) on these probabilities based on a finite number of observations of the noise. Our abstraction procedure ensures that we obtain a faithful, yet abstract representation of the autonomous system. In fact, this abstraction constitutes a type of Markov decision process, which is the standard type of model in sequential decision making under uncertainty. To analyze our abstract models in a rigorous manner, we use state-of-art tools from an area called formal verification.

Alphabet's Wing division has announced that it's launching a drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex on April 7th. "With this service, the DFW area will be the largest metro in the world, and the first in the United States, with access to on-demand drone delivery," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Wing's primary launch customer is Walgreens, which will deliver health and wellness products directly to customer's homes. For that, it will use a new operational model where drones are staged at one of its own store parking lots, rather than a Wing facility. It will also be delivering ice cream from Blue Bell Creameries, Easyvet prescription pet medications (yep) and first aid kits from Texas Health.

Oakland, California – When Silicon Valley chipmaker Marvell learned that one of its chips was found in a Russian surveillance drone recovered in 2016, it set out to investigate how that came to be. The chip, which costs less than $2, was shipped in 2009 to a distributor in Asia, which sold it to another broker in Asia, which later went out of business. "We couldn't trace it any further," Marvell Technology Group Chief Operations Officer Chris Koopmans said in a recent interview. Years later, it reappeared in the drone recovered in Lithuania. Marvell's experience is one of myriad examples of how chipmakers lack ability to track where many of their lower-end products end up, executives and experts said.

Lviv, Ukraine – At a secret location in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, the windows taped up to ward off unwanted attention, underground hobbyists improvise deadly drones bound for the front line of the war against Russia. On a cluttered table the X-shaped frame of one drone stands among bundles of plastic propellers and sachets of minuscule screws. Soon it will take flight with its payload: a wine bottle-sized anti-tank grenade designed to plunge on Russian armor. Two other drones are already affixed with quad propellers, their squat bodies gaping with miniature bomb bays to rain explosives on Russian infantry challenging Ukrainian defenders to the north and east. One more -- the shape of a stealth bomber, the size of a bird of prey -- will conduct reconnaissance missions for artillery squads, spotting targets and marking them for incoming fire.

Delivery drones are arriving, at last. After nearly a decade of largely unfulfilled hype about flying robots dropping orders at your doorstep, a handful of companies have started commercial operations in the U.S. involving dozens or hundreds of deliveries a day at each location. The companies are vying to be Americans' choice when they want a bottle of Advil, a takeout meal, or the next iPhone delivered in under 30 minutes--once federal regulators enable broader rollouts.