[kogepathic]

This service has already been running in Rwanda since 2016 with positive results. [0]

It's great to see other countries trying out this form of delivery, as rural roads in Africa can be quite bad.

I'm interested to see if this trial is successful in Tanzania, given that it's geographically much larger than Rwanda and has a much lower population density.

Tanzania: 47.5 persons/km^2 [1]

Rwanda: 445 persons/km^2 [2]

Rwanda is more dense by an order of magnitude.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37646474

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzania

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda

[notahacker]

75km radius according to their promotional material so they won't be covering the whole country without multiple stations to load supplies from. Big contrast with Rwanda where it looks like you can serve the majority of the country from a single depot in the capital.

My guess is they'll focus on a single mountainous area initially.

[awjr]

I suspect longer ranges are possible with intermediary interchange stations, covering the drones in solar panels, and increasing wing span/loading capacity.

The concept is proven. Now they just need to upgrade the drones to create higher capacity.

Really impressive.

[anigbrowl]

Why not? If you said you were going to build roads and put a gas station every 75 km that'd be quite reasonable. You could easily grow a network of stations outward from places that have good infrastructure.

[notahacker]

It's do-able, but every additional station adds cost and complication, especially when you're working on the tiny margins and low volumes of developing world drug deliveries in sparsely populated areas. Serving an entire country from the capital (as they probably did in Rwanda) is pretty much the ideal case.

[zx76]

I hadn't heard of this service before - all very interesting. I found another article on Wired [1] that gives a good overview.

It's unlikely to be an issue in the wide open spaces of these countries - but an autonomous equivalent of the ATC system for drones will be needed when Amazon et al. start doing these deliveries in first world cities. Do you know of any companies working on this problem?

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/zipline-drones-rwanda/

[notahacker]

Other news coverage (e.g http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37646474) suggests that Zipline has some sort of rudimentary reporting to Rwandan ATC already. Presumably a more complex system could be developed allowing coordination of flightplans, remote takeovers etc.

I think the real problem is regulatory; any such system is only likely to happen if it has the explicit blessing of a regional Air Traffic Management authority, in which case they're probably more likely to develop, fund and run it than a startup, though there will be a place for technology companies that don't mind working with their procurement cycles and living off grant money for a while. A quick Google suggests US authorities are working on it http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-drone-traffic-20170501...

Other drone delivery programs in developing countries have foundered because those countries have refused to give permissions for flights out of security concerns.

[tim333]

There seem to be some people working on ATC for drones. Google, NASA, "experts at Nanyang Technological University and the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore" etc https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ATC+system+for+drones

It's quite interesting technically. Regular ATC works by keeping flights quite far apart and separated by 1000ft or more in barometric altitude which wouldn't work with delivery dones but maybe you could use phone style gps location. It's not considered reliable enough for airliners but might be acceptable for drones.

[abakker]

Yes, the work at Google, NASA, and the FAA comes to mind. They are very aware of the need for handling this for the delivery space. With drones, as you pointed out, the flight path "conflicts" are much smaller. There are no wingtip vortices, and the drones take up much smaller physical space. The flights also start and stop much more rapidly. Right now, my impression is that the FAA is not equipped to process a major increase in flight path data with different flight conflict characteristics. Especially when the flight's round trips include a takeoff and landing. There are no "air corridors" in drone delivery, since below 400 feet, many more obstacles go into a flight path, and every house becomes its own airport.

As for drone GPS, there are VERY high accuracy options available using RTK. Especially RTK over satellite with systems from Trimble and Leica coming to mind. These are typically used in terrestrial survey and allow very high degrees of confidence in the physical location of the drones. I don't believe RTK works for planes, but it is in commercial use in drones all over. s

[anigbrowl]

I don't think you need centralized ATC for drones, you just make it a swarm/network function. Drones don't need 1000 feet of clearance; they're smaller, lighter, slower, fly lower, and have high maneuverability. Even when we get to the inevitable air scooter stage for peoples I think a 50 foot clearance will be sufficient.

[squarefoot]

Cities will create another problem: those drones are essentially small airplanes, so that it's pretty easy to build a strip for landing and taking off in rural areas, but smaller roofs in a populated city would make taking off harder and landing extremely hard. VTOL drones like quadcopters could solve that problem but they have much shorter range compared to similar winged aircrafts.

[baldfat]

I think flying drones for home delivery will be the new flying car. I think autonomous road vehicle is the future for cities with an attempt to deliver to the home and then to a central pick up.

Reason is money. UPS or the USPS can do it if Amazon and Walmart don't beat them first. Salaries and benefits are the biggest slice of the pie for expenses.

[theklub]

Vice doc on the roads in africa... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GslPzhFLyas

Also the "long way down" is good.

[brass9]

Interesting! This is the first time I'm hearing about Zipline in Rwanda.

We're establishing a pharmaceutical (generics) formulation plant in Kigali. Technologies like zipline could come in handy for our project...