“It’s one of those things where once you have it, all of a sudden, you realize how transformative it can be for your life.”“I get to do all the cool tech and product development here at Zipline to enable drone delivery at scale,” Keenan Wyrobek tells“Zipline has been on a mission ever since to create the first logistics system that really serves all humans equally and solves that problem at scale,” he adds.
“We just achieved our millionth delivery a few days ago, which is really exciting. Over a hundred million kilometers have now been flown on that system around the world,” Wyrobek shares.“ we’re talking about requiring a few parking spots worth of space in order to deliver, which works very well in areas outside of metro areas,” he reveals.
He also explains that Platform 2 has a two-part architecture. “So while the drone is hovering at one hundred meters up, it lowers down this thing we call a ‘droid,’ and is what has your package,” Wyrobek explains. “The third pillar is hot meal delivery — and I like to say hot meal delivery because we fly fast and we’re not affected by traffic,” he says. “So when we deliver a meal, it is still hot, which is something that people appreciate.”
Collecting, testing, typing, and separating blood into different products, such as red blood cells versus plasma platelets, and transporting it to various locations incur significant costs. There’s also blood’s very short shelf life to consider. “ found that the hospitals we serve in Rwanda were able to reduce their maternal mortality rates by over 50 percent—and that is pretty mind-blowing,” he states. “Safety is core to everything we do here at Zipline,” Wyrobek says.
“However, it turns out cameras just fundamentally don’t see far enough reliably to maintain the level of separation regulators want to see,” he adds. , he explains that by the time you can see far enough in all directions, it weighs much more than the whole drone system. “So you just can’t physically get it off the ground on your drones.”“I think of it very similarly to how, as we go for a walk outside, we don’t see an airplane first; we hear it first.