Google parent Alphabet has two new businesses under its name. The firm announced on Wednesday that it's'graduating' Project Loon and Project Wing from moonshots to full-fledged businesses at Alphabet. Project Loon, its internet-bearing balloon initiative, and Project Wing, its drone delivery service, were launched in 2013 and 2014, respectively, as part of its research-and-development lab Google X. Alphabet's Google X announced on Wednesday that its moonshots Project Loon and Project Wing would'graduate' to full companies. Now, Loon and Wing will be included in Alphabet's'Other Bets' category, which includes former Google X moonshots like deep learning research project Google Brain, life sciences research arm Verily as well as self-driving car startup Waymo, among others. The CEO of Loon will be Alastair Westgarth, former CEO of antenna company Quintel, while longtime Google employee James Ryan Burgess is the CEO of Wing, Google X head Astro Teller announced in a blog post.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. The drone future that we all know is coming--more drones, everywhere, ferrying our stuff to wherever we want it sent--isn't coming just yet. Before flying robots can speckle the sky from coast to coast, the government needs to pass regulations that allow drones to fly beyond the line of sight of the operator, over densely populated areas, and at night--all things currently prohibited unless the drone operator gets a special waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration. Drones also have to be integrated into the national air traffic control system, which will have to help coordinate their movement and ensure the autonomous flyers don't collide in the sky. But before any of that gets off the ground, the U.S. Department of Transportation is giving the green light to 10 areas across the country to set up test sites for drones to do things like delivery, mosquito-killing, and security.

A couple of years ago, Zipline created a national drone delivery system to ship blood and drugs to remote medical centers in Rwanda. Now it has developed what it claims is the world's swiftest commercial delivery drone, with a top speed of 128 kilometers an hour (a hair shy of 80 miles per hour). Zipline is hoping its new fixed-wing aerial robot, which is both speedier and easier to maintain than its predecessor, will help it win business in an industry that's attracted plenty of big players. They include Amazon, which has been testing its Prime Air drone delivery service for years in the UK and elsewhere, and Project Wing, part of Alphabet's secretive X lab, which is using its drones to deliver pharmaceuticals and burritos in a pilot project in Australia. Soon these and other companies will be able to experiment more in America, too.

In the hope of making drone deliveries even more accurate, Project Wing has started making deliveries directly to people's houses in southeastern Australia. The firm announced that it will deliver food from Mexican food chain, Guzman y Gomez, and medicines from Chemist Warehouse pharmacies to customers in rural areas on the border of the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales. Project Wing, which is run by Google parent Alphabet, hopes the trials will help to fine-tune how its drones move goods from where they're located to where they're needed. In the hope of making drone deliveries even more accurate, Alphabet's Project Wing has started making deliveries directly to people's houses in southeastern Australia Project Wing's aircraft has a wingspan of approximately 1.5m (4.9ft) and have four electrically-driven propellers. The total weight, including the package to be delivered, is approximately 10kg (22lb). The aircraft itself accounts for the bulk of that at 8.5kg (18.7lb).

Apparently, Project Wing brought airborne burritos to Virginia Tech last year as preparation for something bigger. Alphabet X's experimental project is now dropping burritos (and medicine) from the skies of Australia as part of a series of tests to figure out how to run a drone delivery service efficiently. Project Wing Co-Lead James Ryan Burgess said they've teamed up with Australia Mexican food chain Guzman y Gomez and pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse to drop off orders to testers living in a rural area. These testers usually have to take a 40-minute round trip by car to get to the nearest grocery or restaurant, making them the perfect subjects for Wing's experiments. Project Wing has to conduct these tests, because while it has a system that can pre-configure routes, its drones rely on on-board sensors to avoid obstacles.

If you've been scratching your head at the FAA's extensive efforts to regulate your personal (or company) drone use, consider the chaos when they start filling the skies. That's why the agency partnered with NASA for a series of nationwide tests to explore potential systems that could track and manage a wide range of drones simultaneously. Google parent company Alphabet's Project Wing tried out its own UAV air traffic control platform yesterday, a system that might one day guide a massive volume of airborne drones to keep them from crashing into buildings, people or each other. Unsurprisingly, Project Wing's UTM (UAS Air Traffic Management) leans heavily on other Google products like Maps, Earth and Street View to navigate drones around obstacles and plan routes. During yesterday's tests, UTM managed flight paths for multiple UAVs simultaneously, according to the group's blog post.

Friends and colleagues were aware, at some level, that Nick Roy, a researcher in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), had been using his sabbatical to take on some sort of robotics-related role at Google. But few people knew the full scope of his work until this past week, when Google X -- the infamous idea incubator known for Google Glass, self-driving cars, and wireless hot-air balloons -- unveiled a video introducing Project Wing, an ambitious delivery-drone initiative that Roy has overseen for the past two years. At Google X's secret Mountain View headquarters, Roy, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, led a team of several dozen autonomy experts to determine the technical feasibility of self-flying delivery vehicles. Project Wing lined up nicely with Roy's work as head of CSAIL's Robust Robotics Group, which focuses in part on sensing, planning, and controlling unmanned vehicles in environments without GPS. He even brought on board a handful of key MIT collaborators, including recent graduates Abraham Bachrach PhD '13 and Adam Bry SM '11, whose state-estimation algorithms have drastically improved unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in indoor spaces.

Google owner Alphabet's subsidiary research company, X, has shut down its project aimed at building a solar-powered drone intended to bring internet access to remote areas. The project, which stemmed from an acquisition Google made in April 2014 of New Mexico-based Titan Aerospace, was deemed by X to be less promising than a competing attempt to use lightweight weather balloons for the same purpose. "The team from Titan was brought into X in late-2015. We ended our exploration of high-altitude UAVs for internet access shortly after," an X spokesperson said. "By comparison, at this stage the economics and technical feasibility of Project Loon [its high-altitude balloon project] present a much more promising way to connect rural and remote parts of the world. Many people from the Titan team are now using their expertise as part of other high-flying projects at X, including Loon and Project Wing."

The latest Google drones have just started taking flight in the real world. But the team behind the technology is slowing down, trimming headcount and shelving initiatives as the experimental unit becomes the latest target of tightening budgets across parent company Alphabet Inc. Project Wing, a unit of Alphabet's X research lab, nixed a partnership with coffee giant Starbucks Corp., according to people familiar with the decision. Following the departure of project leader Dave Vos in October, the unit also froze hiring and began asking some staff to seek jobs elsewhere in the company, according to some of those people. They asked not to be identified speaking about private company moves. The decisions are part of a broader Alphabet effort to rein in spending and try to turn more experimental projects from loss-making risky bets into real businesses.

Is Alphabet's'Project Wing' in trouble? Google's parent company cuts back on staff after axing deal to deliver Starbucks using drones Project Wing's aircrafts has a wingspan of approximately 1.5m (4.9ft) and have four electrically-driven propellers. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules.