Tanzania becomes the latest country to use Zipline drones for medical deliveries | Hacker News Reader

Tanzania becomes the latest country to use Zipline drones for medical deliveries

iafrikan.com

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This service has already been running in Rwanda since 2016 with positive results. [0]

It's great to see other countries trying out this form of delivery, as rural roads in Africa can be quite bad.

I'm interested to see if this trial is successful in Tanzania, given that it's geographically much larger than Rwanda and has a much lower population density.

Tanzania: 47.5 persons/km^2 [1]

Rwanda: 445 persons/km^2 [2]

Rwanda is more dense by an order of magnitude.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37646474

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzania

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda

75km radius according to their promotional material so they won't be covering the whole country without multiple stations to load supplies from. Big contrast with Rwanda where it looks like you can serve the majority of the country from a single depot in the capital.

My guess is they'll focus on a single mountainous area initially.

I suspect longer ranges are possible with intermediary interchange stations, covering the drones in solar panels, and increasing wing span/loading capacity.

The concept is proven. Now they just need to upgrade the drones to create higher capacity.

Really impressive.

Why not? If you said you were going to build roads and put a gas station every 75 km that'd be quite reasonable. You could easily grow a network of stations outward from places that have good infrastructure.

It's do-able, but every additional station adds cost and complication, especially when you're working on the tiny margins and low volumes of developing world drug deliveries in sparsely populated areas. Serving an entire country from the capital (as they probably did in Rwanda) is pretty much the ideal case.

I hadn't heard of this service before - all very interesting. I found another article on Wired [1] that gives a good overview.

It's unlikely to be an issue in the wide open spaces of these countries - but an autonomous equivalent of the ATC system for drones will be needed when Amazon et al. start doing these deliveries in first world cities. Do you know of any companies working on this problem?

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/zipline-drones-rwanda/

Other news coverage (e.g http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37646474) suggests that Zipline has some sort of rudimentary reporting to Rwandan ATC already. Presumably a more complex system could be developed allowing coordination of flightplans, remote takeovers etc.

I think the real problem is regulatory; any such system is only likely to happen if it has the explicit blessing of a regional Air Traffic Management authority, in which case they're probably more likely to develop, fund and run it than a startup, though there will be a place for technology companies that don't mind working with their procurement cycles and living off grant money for a while. A quick Google suggests US authorities are working on it http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-drone-traffic-20170501...

Other drone delivery programs in developing countries have foundered because those countries have refused to give permissions for flights out of security concerns.

There seem to be some people working on ATC for drones. Google, NASA, "experts at Nanyang Technological University and the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore" etc https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ATC+system+for+drones

It's quite interesting technically. Regular ATC works by keeping flights quite far apart and separated by 1000ft or more in barometric altitude which wouldn't work with delivery dones but maybe you could use phone style gps location. It's not considered reliable enough for airliners but might be acceptable for drones.

Yes, the work at Google, NASA, and the FAA comes to mind. They are very aware of the need for handling this for the delivery space. With drones, as you pointed out, the flight path "conflicts" are much smaller. There are no wingtip vortices, and the drones take up much smaller physical space. The flights also start and stop much more rapidly. Right now, my impression is that the FAA is not equipped to process a major increase in flight path data with different flight conflict characteristics. Especially when the flight's round trips include a takeoff and landing. There are no "air corridors" in drone delivery, since below 400 feet, many more obstacles go into a flight path, and every house becomes its own airport.

As for drone GPS, there are VERY high accuracy options available using RTK. Especially RTK over satellite with systems from Trimble and Leica coming to mind. These are typically used in terrestrial survey and allow very high degrees of confidence in the physical location of the drones. I don't believe RTK works for planes, but it is in commercial use in drones all over. s

I don't think you need centralized ATC for drones, you just make it a swarm/network function. Drones don't need 1000 feet of clearance; they're smaller, lighter, slower, fly lower, and have high maneuverability. Even when we get to the inevitable air scooter stage for peoples I think a 50 foot clearance will be sufficient.

Cities will create another problem: those drones are essentially small airplanes, so that it's pretty easy to build a strip for landing and taking off in rural areas, but smaller roofs in a populated city would make taking off harder and landing extremely hard. VTOL drones like quadcopters could solve that problem but they have much shorter range compared to similar winged aircrafts.

I think flying drones for home delivery will be the new flying car. I think autonomous road vehicle is the future for cities with an attempt to deliver to the home and then to a central pick up.

Reason is money. UPS or the USPS can do it if Amazon and Walmart don't beat them first. Salaries and benefits are the biggest slice of the pie for expenses.

Vice doc on the roads in africa... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GslPzhFLyas

Also the "long way down" is good.

Interesting! This is the first time I'm hearing about Zipline in Rwanda.

We're establishing a pharmaceutical (generics) formulation plant in Kigali. Technologies like zipline could come in handy for our project...

The company I work for, LLamasoft, works with Zipline to model and optimize their supply chain. We did a press release Aug 30th, if anyone is curious. Fortunately we have had support for different modes of transport for a long time, so adopting drones into our model was trivial.

https://www.llamasoft.com/llamasoft-supports-zipline-improve...

In the video the drone dropped the package on the roof using a small parachute. Many buildings shown there seem to have those walled flat roofs which are accessible via stairs which is also popular in the middle east.

That seems to be a critical part for implementing this in an urban delivery system. People will likely need to install some sort of out-of-reach delivery chute on their roof or some sort of box on the buildings to prevent theft.

It will make it more expensive to implement but I can't see how deliveries would work without some sort of on-the-ground infrastructure like this.

But when it does happen though it will be glorious.

I think flying drones for home delivery will be the new flying car. I think autonomous road vehicle is the future for cities with an attempt to deliver to the home and then to a central pick up.

Reason is money. UPS or the USPS can do it if Amazon and Walmart don't beat them first. Salaries and benefits are the biggest slice of the pie for expenses.

Are automated ground based vehicles really going to out perform automated flight based ones?

I can see that for large packages (~50% of current parcel delivery?) but that still leaves all standard envelope based mail and smaller package. Such as books by Amazon or the very broad group of various daily products people would START purchasing online if they could get same day delivery.

If we look merely at how things work now - yes - I believe what you're saying makes the most sense. Because it's merely a big optimization of the current systems.

But I believe this downplays the innovation that very fast same-day delivery of packages (within a few hours even) that drones could provide. It would seriously expand the scope of services businesses like UPS and Fedex can provide.

Suddenly pharmacies, drug dealers, restaurants, local bakeries, convenience stores, gas stations, liquor/wine stores, etc, etc have a new retail venue.

Why stop at the busy gas station to fill your cars tank before the daily commute when you can wake up to a prepaid jerry can in your drone box?

I'd bet the answer will likely be a combination of both with a much higher volume in the drone delivery side.

If the drone has a precise drop rate then you could just setup a catch net, then simple lower the net and retrieve the package.

At last a real use for drones. And also drones and launch systems well designed for the duty.

FWIW, multirotors and RC aircraft with camera systems have been in use in the US for search and rescue operations for years.

They're also good for concert videos. But yes, not much else yet. Needs real-time obstacle avoidance.

There might be other startup opportunities here. Our postal service at least has this where they has to deliver letters 5 days of week and cost can be pretty high https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

It sounds like this is more a political issue rather than a technological issue.

This is really a great application for quick transportation to a remote zone, which is so crucial in remote areas. But I can't help think that for each 'good' application, there might be dozens that are not so beneficial, for example : Drugs and Arms delivery across border, just to name few ....

I have nothing against the technology, I'm just really curious about it's more 'nefarious' uses.

Any technology can be used in ways the inventor had not intended, and possibly would not wish.

According to zipline website [0], there will be 4 stations, Mwanza, Geita, Mbeya and Dodoma. Looking on maps, Geita and Mwanza are really close to each other, moreover looks like at least third of potentially covered land around Mwanza is water. Wonder what is the reason behind this.

[0] http://www.flyzipline.com/service/

While I liks the drone idea, I have to be pedantic here:

But that mission can be a challenge during emergencies, times of unexpected demand, bad weather, or for small but critical orders.

Um 2-3 out of those four will not be improved by drones!

Using drones for just-in-time deliveries will allow us to provide health facilities with complete access to vital medical products no matter the circumstance,” concluded Bwanakunu.

Including bad weather eh?

Yes, including some bad weather scenarios. Drones are likely not great in torrential rain, but things like flooding and fog shouldn't be issues for them whereas they would for drivers.

Emergencies (presumably political or military) will bring challenges of their own (since drones could conceivably be doing espionage and might be shot at), but can be routed around, and for times of unexpected demand it's a lot cheaper to store and launch many drones than it is to whistle up many trucks and drivers.

OF course the use case is limited at present due to payload limitations and so forth, but is there anyone who doesn't expect that to keep improving?

While drones are indeed still susceptible to a multitude of bad weather scenarios in the air, they do bypass several major scenarios on the ground that frequently interrupt supply lines like flooding, fires, avalanches, etc.

Heavy rains can make dirt roads impassible. This is why transportation to clinics in remote villages becomes unreliable in the rainy season.

Example: http://www.frontpageafricaonline.com/images/countynews/bcty-...

There is a relevant drone competition called the UAV Challenge Medical Express where teams have to retrieve a blood sample from a remote location. https://uavchallenge.org/medical-express/

Is there more extensive description of what the Medical items delivered actually are? I guess it's mostly just blood?

It's not just blood, but that's a large portion of it. Flying out supplies really makes sense when you consider material that needs to be refrigerated (like blood). Rural African roads during wet season can be outright unusable; moving stuff can be a matter of weeks just to move something a few miles.

Could also be vaccinations that require a cold chain.

Tanzania launches the world's largest 2015/16 drone-hype VC funding delivery service

What if, instead, we reached the "slope of enlightenment" and these are useful applications that will lead to the plateau of productivity?

>the plateau of productivity

Google title for a book. Start a kickstarter and get rich $$$.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

This title "...latest..." threw me off a bit. Somehow associated "last" with that. Yet I have no problem when it comes to "latest tech", "latest research". Weird.

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