So we're in Half Moon Bay at one of our test facilities where we do a lot of prototyping
and engineering development and test flights.
This is the location where we're developing the next generation of drone, and the next
generation of technology that's being incorporated into our product.
We need small electric drones to deliver life-saving medicine like blood and vaccines and
snake anti-venom to places that previously lacked access.
Zipline builds distribution centers in areas with great need, where they lack access to
most medical products and Zipline serves thousands of hospitals directly.
Basically, all that needs to happen is a patient comes into a hospital and the doctor makes
a determination of what that patient means and all they have to do is pick up the phone
and call us and within a few minutes, our distribution center receives that order, packs,
the medical products into a small cardboard box, loads them into the belly of our drone
and launches that drone into flight. That drone then flies fully autonomously directly to
that healthcare facility.
Then without landing and opens its doors and its belly and drops that cardboard box out
from the sky. Zipline is built on top of many different technologies that already exist.
For example, we leverage GPS. We leverage all the advances in electric motors and the newest
state of the art batteries and the innovation that Zipline has created, has been a combination
of all these existing technologies into a very simple, very reliable and easy to operate drone.
Our drone weighs about 50 pounds, 22 kilograms.
We have a wingspan of 3.3 meters, we fly at about 100 kilometers per hour.
That's highway speed. Our drone looks much more like a miniature airplane. We design
our aircraft to be single fault tolerant.
That basically means any one thing can go wrong in the airplane, and the plane can still
complete its mission and come back home successfully.
So we have two motors, but we can fly on one.
We have eight control surfaces, but we can fly if any one of them failed..
So this is the battery of the drone, it's about half the weight of the entire vehicle.
This is designed to be able to allow us to fly to any site within 80 kilometers, deliver
the package from the sky without landing, or recharging. Then turn around and fly all the
way back, and land safely.
Tucked away beneath the wing are the main computers, of our drone,
they basically have a lot of different sensors hooked up to them and they're receiving input
from other sensors onboard like battery, like the air data sensors and the wing.
And they're making decisions at 50 times per second, about how to control the aircraft,
and whether or not the aircraft is in safe condition to continue its mission control
The launcher has a few main components. We have the electric motor which actually accelerates
the airplane into flight. We have the long aluminum rail, which acts as a guide for the
carriage, which is what the airplane sits on. And then we have the operator control panel
which is basically a series of buttons that the operator uses to launch the airplane.
At the end of the launch rail, we actually have what's called an eddy current brake, which
is a really powerful magnet that applies a braking force without using friction, to the
carriage.
So the carriage has a thin metal fin.
And when that metal fin glides past those magnets, it applies a really strong force
to slow the cartridge down.
And so this cartridge goes really fast and slows down suddenly, and the aircraft is no
longer retained into the carriage and the aircraft pulls out, detects that it's flying and flies
itself autonomously from that point forward. The launcher accelerates the drone from
zero to 100 kilometers an hour in .3 seconds.
We've designed seven generations of drone in five years.
Each and every generation is taking learnings from the previous generation and iterating
upon those learnings.
So throughout those generations, the drone has changed a lot in how it works.
The beauty of the recovery system is its simplicity. At all times our aircraft knows very precisely
where it is in flight.
And so the aircraft is actually controlling the recovery system.
The aircraft is telling the recovery system where exactly it is and how it's moving through
space.
So this tiny hook here is how we land the aircraft.
A thin rope is accelerated upward and into that little divot right there to catch the airplane
out of the sky, decelerate it, and gently lower to the ground.
When we receive an order,
it's often because there's a patient waiting for that medical product.
And so we have to be very reliable and very efficient in terms of everything we do.
We need to be fast and get in that plane into the sky.
We need to make sure the right products are packed and sent to the right place.
And then we need to make sure that no matter what problems that aircraft encounters on
the way.
We're still going to be able to get those products to that doctor as fast as we can.
Countries like Rwanda face many challenges in terms of being able to move things around
the country. We're able to fly over all of those troubles fly through the rainstorms
and deliver to places that are entirely cut off from any national scale infrastructure.
I really can't wait for the day where it's obvious to most people that yeah of course
drones are how you move products around the planet.