Zipline: Drone delivery of medical supplies
flyzipline.com
flyzipline.com
Recommend the 2019 JuliaCon video on how Zipline uses Julia for vehicle simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8rPZVotroY
And this video by Real Engineering that does a great job of explaining how the whole thing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c
I live in a rural region in the US and can pretty much drive anywhere within 50 miles in about an hour, with hundreds of pounds of whatever. There's no market for slightly faster deliveries of 3 pounds.
I would inject a healthy dose of scepticism here.
To the chagrin of American HN readers, I'd say that while the total digits are incomparable, the number of technical enterprises is certainly bigger outside of USA. Most of those companies can't find a single reason why they have to be in USA.
USA technology sector is overcrowded, and overfunded, and I am not the only one person around who can make this observation.
Looks like they are headquartered in US though.
It's quite interesting how they evade issues with landing and lifting the plane, lifting the plane by shooting it off a rail seems like a common approach but landing it by catching it using a small hook at the tail of the plane isn't that common I presume.
On their website it says "Gas combustion vehicles break down, get stuck in traffic jams that prevent urgent response, and put human drivers at risk behind the wheel, particularly when the route is rough and treacherous. Zipline’s drones are battery powered and fly quickly and directly to their destinations, leaving ground vehicles behind." That sounds like an unfair comparison, a more accurate comparison would have been to gas powered drones. Is it still the case for gas powered drones that they're more unreliable than electrical drones? It's probably because of the weight of a gas powered engine in such a small drone no?
Been used by the Navy since 1911.
Ok, the first 4 were lost but this is a huge journey with limited fuel and bad weather. And navigation was a problem too.
The big benefit of gas powered in larger vehicles is both the easy fast refueling and the higher energy density of fuel. Combustion engines for model airplanes are heavier than their electric counterparts because you can only scale things down so much, you still need to contain a constant fire and the associated pressure.
And in this usecase the slow recharge isn't really an issue anyway. It also makes sense for marketing reasons, being 'green'. Even though if fuel were used, you could probably run this entire company for a year on the fuel a semi truck would burn to drive 100km :) I don't think it would be a bad thing for the environment if a company like this would use fossil fuel, it's still a lot less wasteful than the alternatives.
Still incomparable to any other option. Having 1 in 1000 crash chance will disqualify it as a DHL alternative.
Putting 2 of them on the drone will surely make it cost more than $500
And putting even the cheapest turbine on it is out of question, unless you talk about toy turbines that are as unreliable as RC piston motors.
I've seen hobbyist level plans for them, and a pulsejet requires zero moving parts, so reliability should be excellent. The geometry of the engine does all the work.
Valves, and pumps are moving parts too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valveless_pulsejet
Fuel can be either gravity fed or possibly a pressurized system (e.g. fill the deadspace in the tanks with compressed nitrogen)
A lot of military drones have a hook at the end of one wing, and they hang a vertical wire under tension from a boom arm, with a differential gps receiver at the top of the wire. Ends up it's all accurate enough for the drone to catch the wire. I presume zipline went with their more complex approach as wings strong enough to just snag and stop would be past their weight limits.
It's a comparison for customers, showcasing the difference between zipline's solution (electric drones) and the existing solution (gas trucks) to the problem zipline is trying to solve (medical logistics). If gas drones or electric trucks were to enter the space then it should be updated.
Through the sheer force of willpower by the CEO (Keller) they found a new path and have become what they are. It’s a great startup story of how to persevere.
Disclosure: My firm was one of their first investors.
We always had aspirations of building robots that solved real problems. Our early plan was to slowly make the toy robot more and more useful. But suddenly in 2013, it felt like the robotics industry was moving much faster than we expected. We threw out the plan and started searching for the highest impact work we could do.
We spent months talking to customers, exploring technical approaches, and decided to race to bring something to market. Within two years, we were making daily lifesaving deliveries by drone.
Can someone shed light on their economies of scale? What are the challenges they may be facing?
It is also interesting to know the technical and engineering challenges they may be facing with the technology. Are they drones completely autonomous? Command Control can change the route mid-flight? How do they do communication in long-range? How do they handle faults in-flight?
A drone like zipline's latest model cost at most $500 in low volume manufacturing.
Making at least 10000 of them in one go will likely to halve the price, and I see them going there over last few models.
With 100km range, you have to put extra droneports on the triangular grid.
To link the US West Coast North to South you will need a minimum of 20 droneports. Add 10 more of them reach most major coastal cities.
So, making a commitment to buy 10k drones over 2-3 years, and operating 20 droneports should cost around $4m-$5m a year. With just $1m going to drones themselves.
Making $5m a year from small package express delivery on Seattle-LA route should be not that hard. 200 packages a day at DHL prices.
You can halve the droneport costs if you make bigger drones for longer range transport in between two major hubs, but that's the problem.
100km is a practical limit of an electric fixed wing drones that carry sub 1kg payloads. If you want more than that, you either make them really big, or venture into play with supermaterials like CFRP, or IC engines/turbines. The cheapest PT6A variant costs $500k...
100km is round trip right?
Trucks and human drivers walking up to doorsteps are insanely wasteful, slow, and expensive. I wish more apartment buildings and metro neighborhoods were into pneumatic tube systems, too.
The last time they were tried, microcontrollers and fiber optic networking weren’t as good as they are now. A packet switched automated last mile system for everyone would be incredible.
But I agree with the rest of your comment.
Also looking at projects like the hyperloop, I'm wondering if a smaller version linking cities would make sense. We already have infrastructure for transporting oil and natural gas through very long pipelines. How about actual packages? If the hyperloop can make sense, I feel like inter-city mini vacuum train probably can as well, and linking two cities together doesn't require any great flexibility.
Just curious if I missed something on the site
A drone could be attached to the balloon and it would help reduce the energy needed to fight gravity and could probably cruise for a much longer distance.
You can tweak for thicknesses and pressures some - but hydrogen is also corrosive in addition to being flammable and explosive.
Minimizing footprint was our #1 priority to help our customers who have considerable data limitations. Also getting most everything to load nicely with the first resource was key for slow connections (10s of seconds per resource). This has the nice effect in the US of being pretty much instant