It's neat to see this on hacker news. Good to hear that folk are noticing that our system works! I've been working on embedded systems at Zipline for 6 years, and oddly haven't made it out to Rwanda yet. Everyone there seems to know my name, though, because of all the weird problems I've helped remotely debug over the years. I think Zipline's flight operators deserve the lion's share of credit for our success in Rwanda.
<i>In the United States and the United Kingdom, 80 percent of the population clusters around urban hubs with high-traffic hospitals and blood banks. In African nations like Libya, Djibouti, and Gabon, about 80 to 90 percent of the populations live in cities, too. But in Rwanda, that number flips: 83 percent of Rwandans live in rural areas.<p>DON’T BE FOOLED by Rwanda’s rural demographics; the country has a reputation for leaning into health tech innovations. Rwanda’s universal health care system reaches over 90 percent of the population. In 2009, the government piloted a phone-based program, called RapidSMS, to track and reduce maternal and child mortality. By 2013, RapidSMS connected 15,000 villages to the country’s wider network of doctors, hospitals, and ambulances.</i><p>This is inspiring.
There's this new podcast <i>What's your problem?</i> from Pushkin Industries, about the big problems entrepreneurs face and try to tackle, and one of their first episodes was about Zipline:<p><a href="https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/launching-drone-delivery/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/launching-drone-delivery/</a><p><a href="https://www.pushkin.fm/show/whats-your-problem/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pushkin.fm/show/whats-your-problem/</a><p>The big challenge they talk about is bringing the service (which already works in Rwanda) to the US, where aviation regulation is very different.<p><i>(Cautionary Tales</i> with Tim Harford, about "awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos" and what one can learn from them is also entertaining and informative.)
I watched the videos about this, and compared against the videos of GoogleX Wing. I just don't get how they can be so different, or more precisely, how or why Wing is doing what it's doing.<p>This Zipline stuff is launching simple, low-cost vehicles, dropping very valuable (even life-saving) things from parachutes as simply as they can.<p>Google is launching very complex (part helicopter, part fixed wing) aircraft, lowering $5 coffee drinks to people so it doesn't spill.<p>How can it be so different? Do they just... have too much money and are over engineering something because they can? or have lost the plot? Or will they eventually get into delivery of some good that will justify the cost?<p>Or maybe I'm being a little harsh and it's just a reflection that in developed countries, life-saving needs are already taken care of quite well at the local level and all we have are coffee drinks to satisfy people's urgent desires nowadays.
I remember hearing about this in a video on drone delivery in Phoenix AZ, which due to weather conditions seems like a great place to fly drones. The big takeaway was drones make great sense in places where no delivery infrastructure by ground exists and the airspace isn't highly restricted, and that they don't make tons of sense elsewhere. Also that autonomous takeoff and landing are hard to get right, and plenty of people in cities rent small apartments and don't have a space like a yard or a large balcony big enough to just have a drone easily, safely automatically land.<p>I saw <i>another</i> video about a network of automated delivery bots on a very famous and chaotic Minecraft server, 2b2t, run by an opportunistic software developer. Players who want large amounts of valuable in-game items make a small payment of real life currency to this player† and request it to drop them off at a certain set of in-game co-ordinates. The bot player uses a glider to get there and delivers large payloads of valuable items taken from a secret cache. Then the bot self-destructs so that they respawn at the secret cache instead of potentially revealing its location by going back. A very large chunk of the server's player base of players on this server have no home base, and just roam a very chaotic landscape which has mainly just large main highways, which get griefed often. It's only a game, but I think that models to us how relatively wealthy nomads living in very rural area/the wilderness would be a good target market for drone delivery.<p>I think for automated delivery systems in well-connected/developed areas, we want a system that uses small rails/tubes like what we see in Brave New World.<p>† This is against Minecraft's terms of service, but they do it anyways.
For those blocked by a paywall, Real Engineering did a video on it [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c</a>]. The most interesting aspects to me were:<p>- The drone is not a quadcopter, they are too inefficient. Mini plane design.<p>- GPS device is directly attached to the swappable battery unit to ensure it is always connected to a satellite, eliminating satellite connection delays when the drone powers up.<p>- It is launched into a sky by a powered rail. It doesn't need to land to deliver the goods, the items get parachuted down. No infrastructure needed on the receiving end, the item just drops from the sky.<p>- For landing the drone flies past an aircraft arresting wire while hooking onto it which decelerates it and causes it to swing down (suspended above the ground). Easy to retrieve.
Wendover Productions did a great video detailing this a few years back. It’s so cool what they’ve done.<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0</a><p>Also, Wendover have a fantastic Youtube channel that’s focused on global logistics. It’s endlessly fascinating and extremely well executed. Strongly recommended.
At the same time you can't fly drones pretty much anywhere in CA, and the situation is even worse in TX. In TX you can't even make photo/video from drone and it is a crime of trafficking in such photo/video ("land of the free" despising government overreach :).<p>Drones is a transformative technology, and we as usually go for 19th century Red Flag car laws.
Great article - this is the first time I am reading about the positive effects of drones where it has actually saved lives. I have also read that Rwanda is doing very well recently since their terrible civil war in the 90s.
Off topic question. I am an electrical engineer and a software developer. Can anyone guide me on books and resources to design this sort of a drone?<p>Quad copter drones are easier to make, and have a lot of resources.<p>But, I feel these mini plane types drones will be the workhorses in coming years.
There was a recent article [1] in the Guardian on this.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2022/apr/20/healthcare-by-air-rwandas-life-saving-medical-drones" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2022/...</a>
Good to see the results are positive. Zipline has been covered many times on HN over the years:<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zipline+drone" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zipline+drone</a>
Can I just say I am jealous that Rwanda has universal health care? I don't know all the details, and I do think it is easier to govern smaller countries, but dang, that's cool.
Fascinating!<p>My inner seceng wonders ( which likely cannot be answered in an open forum :) ) about the security of the system since the payloads are likely valuable - meds and all.