These vegan meal kits and delivery services bring preprepared meals and meal kits to your door. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Vegan-specific meal kit services are a modern miracle for vegans, who usually aren't afforded the same conveniences as meat eaters or those without dietary restrictions. We at WIRED love meal kits, because they're all about modern convenience--you can eat what you want, even if you're on a specialty diet or have strong food preferences, without ever leaving your house. Gone are the days of grocery shopping and scouring online for recipes; these contemporary vegan meal kit services do the heavy lifting for you using curated menus and algorithms, with choices for both premade microwavable meals and kits where you do the cooking yourself. Some vegan meal kit services, like Hungryroot, use AI customization to curate menus based on your specific tastes. Others, like Daily Harvest, have a set selection of choices so you can always keep your freezer stocked with vegan, gluten-free meals to have on hand.

Energy-Predictive Planning for Optimizing Drone Service Delivery Guanting Ren, Babar Shahzaad, Balsam Alkouz, Abdallah Lakhdari, Ath-man Bouguettaya An Energy-Predictive Drone Service (EPDS) framework to minimize the average delivery time. A heuristic-based optimization for drone services composition to reduce recharging and waiting time. Abstract We propose a novel Energy-Predictive Drone Service (EPDS) framework for efficient package delivery within a skyway network. The EPDS framework incorporates a formal modeling of an EPDS and an adaptive bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) machine learning model. This model predicts the energy status and stochastic arrival times of other drones operating in the same skyway network. Leveraging these predictions, we develop a heuristic optimization approach for composite drone services. This approach identifies the most time-efficient and energy-efficient skyway path and recharging schedule for each drone in the network. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world drone flight dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. Introduction The Internet of Things (IoT) has become more mature and widespread, largely thanks to advancements in software and hardware technologies. Drones serve various purposes, including aiding in farm irrigation, capturing aerial imagery for entertainment, and facilitating the delivery of retail goods (Mohsan et al. (2023)). Drone delivery services are increasingly important because they can offer faster delivery times, lower operational costs, and potentially a greener alternative to traditional delivery methods (Eskandaripour and Boldsaikhan (2023)). Several key challenges, however, hinder the wider adoption of drones for delivery services (Sah et al. (2021)). A primary challenge is constrained battery capacity, which limits a drone's flight range (Huang et al. (2022)). With current lightweight batteries, delivery drones are not well-suited for long-distance trips, particularly when carrying heavy payloads. As a result, some studies propose using drones only for last-mile deliveries (Garg et al. (2023)). Despite these limitations, drones remain a clean, cost-effective, and ubiquitous alternative to land-based delivery in both urban and rural areas (Attenni et al. (2023)).

The next time you order a takeaway, it might be flown directly to your door. Today, Deliveroo has launched its first drone delivery service for customers in Ireland. Drones travelling at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour (80 kph) will carry food from restaurants to customers in as little as three minutes. Upon arrival, the drone will hover above the customer's home and gently lower the food to the ground on a tether before returning to the delivery hub. Launching in Blanchardstown, on the outskirts of Dublin, the trial will cover a 1.8-mile (3km) radius, reaching up to 150,000 people.

Amid a serious truck driver shortage, convenience store chain Seven-Eleven Japan began a trial delivery service using robots on public roads in a western Tokyo suburb on Monday. In the experimental project involving two stores in the city of Hachioji, two robots at each outlet carry items ordered through the 7NOW delivery service app. The four-wheeled box-type robots, which can travel up to 6 kph, are designed to run on sidewalks while following traffic lights and dodging obstacles. After conducting the tests until February next year, Seven-Eleven Japan will consider the feasibility of the robot delivery service, which is expected to help the company cope with a driver shortage and better serve older customers who have difficulty going out shopping.

With the escalating demand for meal delivery services, this study delves into the Meal Delivery Routing Problem (MDRP) within the context of last-mile logis-tics. Focusing on the critical aspects of courier allocation and order fulfillment, we introduce a novel approach utilizing a GRASP metaheuristic. The algorithm optimizes the assignment of couriers to orders, considering dynamic factors such as courier availability, order demands, and geographical locations. Real-world in-stances from a Colombian delivery app form the basis of our computational anal-ysis. Calibration of GRASP parameters reveals a delicate trade-off between solu-tion quality and computational time. Comparative results with a simulation-optimization based study underscore GRASP's competitive performance, demon-strating strengths in fulfilling orders and routing efficiency across diverse in-stances. This research enhances operational efficiency in the burgeoning food de-livery industry, shedding light on practical algorithms for last-mile logistics opti-mization.

Recently, the concept of embodied intelligence has been widely accepted and popularized, leading people to naturally consider the potential for commercialization in this field. In this work, we propose a specific commercial scenario simulation -- human-centered in-building embodied delivery. Furthermore, for this scenario, we have developed a brand-new virtual environment system from scratch, constructing a multi-level connected building space modeled after a polar research station. This environment also includes autonomous human characters and robots with grasping and mobility capabilities, as well as a large number of interactive items. Based on this environment, we have built a delivery dataset containing 13k language instructions to guide robots in providing services. We simulate human behavior through human characters and sample their various needs in daily life. Finally, we proposed a method centered around a large multimodal model to serve as the baseline system for this dataset. Compared to past embodied data work, our work focuses on a virtual environment centered around human-robot interaction for commercial scenarios. We believe this will bring new perspectives and exploration angles to the embodied community.

We propose a novel failure-aware reactive UAV delivery service composition framework. A skyway network infrastructure is presented for the effective provisioning of services in urban areas. We present a formal drone delivery service model and a system architecture for reactive drone delivery services. We develop radius-based, cell density-based, and two-phased algorithms to reduce the search space and perform reactive service compositions when a service failure occurs. We conduct a set of experiments with a real drone dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Following its autonomous food delivery launch in Miami and Fairfax, Virginia, Uber Eats will soon be offering the same robotic service in Japan -- its first outside the US. It is once again collaborating with Google alum startup Cartken, with local compliance help from Mitsubishi Electric, to bring a fleet of Model C sidewalk delivery robots to select areas in Tokyo in March. Uber Eats Japan CEO Shintaro Nakagawa says the autonomous delivery service will solve the local labor shortage issue, while complementing the existing human delivery methods "by bicycle, motorbike, light cargo, and on foot." Cartken's six-wheeled Model C uses six cameras and advanced AI models for autonomous driving plus obstacle detection, and remote control mode is available when needed. With guidance from Mitsubishi, the robot has been modified to suit local needs in Japan.

A California-based company is developing a new drone for delivery services. Drone delivery is the way of the future, revolutionizing the speed and convenience of getting products and food right to your doorstep. Just ask Paul and Susie Sensmeier who've already used it over 1,200 times. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER They are early adopters of Wing's drone delivery service. The married couple from Virginia in their 80s have been using the drone delivery service since 2019, and now it's the only way they want to shop.

Royal Mail has begun using drones to deliver post in the Orkney islands, helping pave the way for drone deliveries to islands around the UK and on the mainland during emergencies. The service between the village of Stromness on Orkney's main island to the nearby islands of Hoy and Graemsay, using aircraft able to carry up to 6kg, is Royal Mail's first permanent drone delivery service. Using drones allows Royal Mail to provide a faster and more secure delivery service to islands such as the Orkneys, avoiding ferries or scheduled air services subject to weather cancellations, tides and timetables that do not suit the postal service. Royal Mail has been testing and evaluating drone services on Scottish islands for some time, as has the NHS, which has trialled their use for flying urgent medical samples from the small Hebridean islands of Coll and Tiree. Chris Paxton, the head of drone trials at Royal Mail, said these flights were far faster and more efficient, and helped cut carbon emissions.