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posted by janrinok on Friday April 06 2018, @09:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the bleeding-helpful dept.

We've been following Zipline very closely for the last few years. The delivery drone startup has been operating in Rwanda since October of 2016, using small autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to paradrop critical blood products to rural medical clinics. The system is able to get blood from a centralized distribution center to where it's needed in minutes, independent of time of day, traffic, or weather. Zipline now manages 20 percent of rural Rwanda's blood supply, and has flown more than 300,000 kilometers (km) worth of commercial deliveries, carrying some 7,000 units of blood.

Today, Zipline is announcing major upgrades to its entire delivery system, introducing a bigger drone that can deliver blood faster and more efficiently than ever. The new hardware is already flying in Rwanda, and Zipline plans to bring their drones to the U.S. to demonstrate medical product delivery in suburban and rural areas later this year.

While we won't go into an exhaustive analysis of what makes the new drone special [...], CEO Keller Rinaudo [*] did give us a few details about how much work Zipline put into the redesign. "Everything has changed," Rinaudo says. "We've spent the last year taking everything we learned from operating the system at national scale, and integrating that into a totally new platform. All of these iterations and improvements have come directly from serving patients, saving lives, and figuring out what those people need from a better system."

[*] As link appeared in original as a Google link to Linkedin url: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keller-rinaudo-0198b018&usg=AOvVaw1wbxPkJ9k-Sb_JAfYyhILQ. --martyb

The most obvious difference is the speed of the drone (improved by 35 percent), as well as the improved range and larger payload. A lot of this is due to better aerodynamics— Rinaudo described the first generation drones as having the aerodynamics of a Humvee, and they managed to double the lift-to-drag ratio of the new drones.

Using fixed-wing drones is far more efficient than using rotorcraft, but it makes launches and landings particularly challenging. Zipline has been using a system of catapults for launching and an arresting system for landings, where the drone deploys a tailhook and snags a cable that brings it to a stop on a soft mat.

Those processes have been upgraded: the new launcher is much faster, and the deployable tailhook has been replaced with a tiny metal hook on the back of the drone's tail boom. This means that the landing target the drones have to hit went from about a meter in size to just one centimeter, but it reduces overall cost and complexity. 

Making the drones easier and cheaper to build and to fix was another priority for Zipline. "It took hours to replace a part on the old aircraft," Rinaudo says, "so we put a huge amount of work into making sure this plane is very easy to maintain, and if you need to swap out a component, it's very easy and fast to do that." It takes about a tenth of the labor to build one of the new aircraft, and we're told they're "dramatically" less expensive, despite the larger size. 

In addition to improvements to the drones themselves, Zipline has made what are arguably much more significant improvements to their overall system to try to reduce unnecessary delays. "The most obvious thing to us is speed is everything—when someone is waiting to receive an emergency medical product, minutes can be the difference between life and death," says Rinaudo. "We've optimized every part of the system, everything has been redesigned to allow us to go as fast as possible. One of the biggest problems was taking too long to launch vehicles, and taking too much labor to get a vehicle through all of the pre-flight checks and launched. That is the primary difference between doing 50 flights a day and 500."


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