Aug 29, 2014 11:47 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Google has drones, but the newly tested autonomous aerial vehicles, a product of the Google X Lab, are envisioned as a future delivery system.

According to BBC News, development of these drones is being referred to as Project Wing and it comes from the same tech research arm that recently tested out a self-driving car. A secret program until now, Project Wing may not be limited to deliveries, an idea Amazon already came up with.

Project Wing has undergone tests in Queensland, Australia, delivering packages to remote farms. The technology giant said they chose Australia for their "progressive" view on the use of drones in everyday life.

"When you have a tool like this you can really allow the operators of those emergency services to add an entirely new dimension to the set of tools and solutions that they can think of," Dave Voss, incoming leader of Project Wing, told BBC News.

The Project Wing drones could one day be used to explore natural disaster sites or navigate an extreme weather event as it is happening. They could also deliver important packages, like medicine and other goods to remote or otherwise inaccessible areas, simultaneously lowering the human risk.

"Even just a few of these, being able to shuttle nearly continuously could service a very large number of people in an emergency situation," Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, told BBC News.

Moonshots is the part of the Google X Lab that not only brainstorms wildly ambitious projects, but tries to materialize them. The Project Wing drone has a 4.9-foot wingspan with four propellers. It does not require a runway of any sort, it can hover in one place and it finds its own route to a predetermined destination.

"The things we would do there are not unlike what is traditionally done in aerospace," Voss said. "It will be clear for us what level of redundancy we need in the controls and sensors, the computers that are onboard, and the motors, and how they are able to fail gracefully such that you don't have catastrophic problems occurring."

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