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Countries across the continent are experimenting with this 21st century technology as a way to leapfrog decades of neglect of 20th century infrastructure.
Over the last two years, San Francisco-based startup Zipline launched a national UAV delivery program in East Africa; South Africa passed commercial drone legislation to train and license pilots; and Malawi even opened a Drone Test Corridor to African and its global partners.
In Rwanda, the country's government became one of the first adopters of performance-based regulations for all drones earlier this year. The country's progressive UAV programs drew special attention from the White House and two U.S. Secretaries of Transportation.
[...] After several test rounds, Zipline went live with the program in October, becoming the world's first national drone delivery program at scale.
"We've since completed over 6000 deliveries and logged 500,000 flight kilometers," Zipline co-founder Keenan Wyrobek told TechCrunch. "We're planning to go live in Tanzania soon and talking to some other African countries."
[...] In a non-delivery commercial use case, South Africa's Rocketmine has built out a UAV survey business in 5 countries. The company looks to book $2 million in revenue in 2018 for its "aerial data solutions" services in mining, agriculture, forestry, and civil engineering.
[...] The continent's test programs — and Rwanda's performance-based drone regulations in particular — could advance beyond visual line of sight UAV technology at a quicker pace. This could set the stage for faster development of automated drone fleets for remote internet access, commercial and medical delivery, and even give Africa a lead in testing flying autonomous taxis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @02:15PM (5 children)
Nice to hear about people coming up with and implementing decentralized solutions to these problems. How much is it to buy one of these drones? Would it be like owning a car, or more like construction equipment where you rent it?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @02:38PM (3 children)
Taking your example a step further, how big is the drone that can deliver construction equipment to the job site? Or for that matter, a container-load (~semi trailer) of anything. Seems to me that it will take a remote controlled CH-47 Chinook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJXid64fDps [youtube.com] and personally, I'd rather not be anywhere near one of these monsters if it was being remote controlled. I want the pilot to have some skin in the game.
Just build and maintain some damn roads for %^&* sake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @04:44PM (2 children)
That Chinook? Requires the skin of 4 people to use it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @08:39PM
Web-scale AI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:47AM
"They rub the lotion on their skin, or they get the hose!" Buffalo Bill's Air Delivery Service. We wont' sweat meating your needs!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 24 2018, @04:11PM
It seems like you would want multiple drones to let one charge while the next one takes a package, and to have spares in case a drone fails.
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