
Zipline: Drone delivery of medical supplies - blopeur
https://flyzipline.com/
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ViralBShah
I learnt about Zipline in a talk at JuliaCon by Tucker McClure who spoke about
how they use Julia for designing and tuning their aircraft. Had the great
fortune of spending an evening at the conference to learn more about the
company itself, how it got started and their use of Julia.

Recommend the 2019 JuliaCon video on how Zipline uses Julia for vehicle
simulation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8rPZVotroY](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c)

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g_airborne
Zipline is such an awesome company. I love that their largest target market is
Africa. Almost every high-tech startup starts with conquering the US en EU
markets even though double-digit growth of economies is now mostly happening
in emergent markets. It’s one of many interesting points touched upon in Hans
Roslings last book (Factfulness - a must read!) and here we have a company
that did exactly that. And they are doing it with such cool technology as
well!

~~~
maxerickson
They are doing high value deliveries in low infrastructure environments.

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.

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cinntaile
The website includes a video [0] that explains how it works in more detail
too.

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?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c)

~~~
GekkePrutser
Gas powered model engines are not that unreliable, even for model airplanes.
One made it all the way across the atlantic:
[https://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amamuseum/2017/03/29/trans...](https://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amamuseum/2017/03/29/transatlantic-
model-flight-equipment/)

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.

~~~
baybal2
> Gas powered model engines are not that unreliable, even for model airplanes.

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.

~~~
TylerE
I wonder if a pulse jet (as used on the V-1) would be an option?

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.

~~~
baybal2
> pulsejet requires zero moving parts, so reliability should be excellent.

Valves, and pumps are moving parts too.

~~~
TylerE
Modern pulsejets don't use valves.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valveless_pulsejet](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)

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zachware
What’s often overlooked about Zipline is that they started as Romotive, a
company that made iPhone—powered robots for kids.

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.

~~~
deepnotderp
Is that story written down anywhere? I'd be interested in learning more about
it ^_^

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roksenhorn
Hi there! Ryan from the Zipline founding team / Romo product lead.

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.

~~~
deepnotderp
Awesome, thanks for answering and welcome to HN :)

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praveen9920
It's wonderful. The word "Droneports" is becoming mainstream.

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?

~~~
baybal2
> Can someone shed light on their economies of scale? What are the challenges
> they may be facing?

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...

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grogenaut
Is the parachute dispoable or does it get returned?

100km is round trip right?

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gertrunde
From the video referenced in other comments, the parachute is disposable
(looks like it's made out of a bit of paper or plastic and packing tape), and
the range is 160km round trip, the service area is an 80km radius around the
droneport.

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aphroz
Technology like this, used to deliver vital services and not enabling more
consumption like we usually see is probably a step in the good direction.

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sneak
This stuff is awesome, and I really hope we reshape society for automated
last-mile.

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.

~~~
vwcx
I suspect you’re getting downvoted for the pneumatic tube sentence, because
tube systems like that have proven to be way too inflexible for a rapidly
changing city. And expensive. And hard to maintain.

But I agree with the rest of your comment.

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traverseda
I haven't really seen any research on packet-switched pneumatic tube networks,
or any kind of more complicated routing. Every time I've seen one in person it
has been more or less point to point, or point to mailroom. I think modern
sensing tools, either NFC or high-speed cameras, have the potential to enable
some significantly better topologies than what I've seen in real world
pneumatic networks.

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.

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eckmLJE
Discussed in this September 2019 New Yorker article:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/jonathan-
ledga...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/jonathan-ledgard-
believes-imagination-could-save-the-world)

~~~
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21038138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21038138)

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jreed91
Love this website. The best part is clicking the arrow on the right and being
able to fly the little drone around the web site.

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balderfer
just wait for v2 ;)

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jreed91
Don't tease me like that!

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olalonde
Impressed by the intro video. It does a great job communicating what they do
in just a few seconds.

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p1mrx
It's like "5-Second Films" for engineering.

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petee
So what prevents the package from being dropped on someone unaware of the
delivery? How heavy and how fast do they fall? Their website doesn't seem to
cover this, the mention of a predetermined drop point makes me think that it
is just gps. And the box in the video seems to drop pretty quick.

Just curious if I missed something on the site

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sgtnoodle
The target drop zone is about the size of a parking spot, and you'll hear the
vehicle coming before it drops the package. They're fun to try and catch
before they hit the ground...

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nojvek
Drones are loud and pretty energy inefficient compared to hydrogen balloons. I
understand large balloons like Zeplins cost a lot of lives, why can’t we make
mini Zeplins for <1kg payloads. Or <5kg payloads. That should scale right?

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.

~~~
Nasrudith
Square cube law says no it doesn't scale well I am afraid. The weight of the
skin scales on surface area and the lift scales on volume of the displaced
air.

You can tweak for thicknesses and pressures some - but hydrogen is also
corrosive in addition to being flammable and explosive.

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blopeur
They are operating in the US already, delivering supplies and PPE to
hospitals.

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rubyron
That’s one of the best logos/icons I’ve seen lately.

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sogen
went to see the logo, but now surprised at how fast the website loads

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balderfer
zipline website designer/builder here

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

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NetOpWibby
I remember watching a doc about this company a couple months ago! Super
awesome company and the tech seems super solid.

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awinter-py
guessing 'make it rain blood' didn't make the cut for slogans

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taylorcooney
This is pretty amazing and inspiring to see for the first time.

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ape4
More decentralized labs and manufacturing might help too.

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dang
We changed the title from "Zipline - Vital, On-Demand Delivery for the World"
which is too marketspeak. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and
neutral) title, we can change it again.

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berbec
Release the hypno-drones

