[arialogistics]

Y Combinator

My name is Arturo Pelayo, I am co-founder of ARIA (Autonomous Roadless Intelligent Array, on the web here: www.Aria-Logistics.com). I want to explain that we have been working with ReAllocate in this project since June (http://aria-logistics.com/reallocate-collaboration/).

ARIA is an open source autonomous logistics infrastructure that leapfrogs traditional road infrastructure and unlocks economic opportunity.

While the IndieGoGo video might appear to be disconnected, there is a flow to all of them because we have been building them for over a year both ARIA on its own by using open source UAVs and ReAllocate by trying to solve 'the last mile' problem by building in-country capacity using retrofitted shipping containers.

Back in June, both ARIA and ReAllocate saw an alignment as ReAllocate wanted to do a drone project for Burning Man. Between both groups, we drafted an open call through Chris Anderson's DIY Drones Community and ARIA also began the process of creating awareness of this collaboration on the website.

ARIA also sought out media coverage through contacts at Wired, Fast Company and other publications. Fast Company published an article about it over a week ago and you can read it here:

http://fastcoexist.com/1680223/a-real-internet-of-things-for...

You will see that the Fast Company article above focuses on ARIA as a company that began last Summer when four of ARIA's cofounders met at Singularity University for the 11-week Graduate Studies Program. During that time worked on 'Matternet': a network of autonomous vehicles that could be used to deliver high-value goods to remote regions of the world with no roads.

The Graduate Studies Program focuses on teaching technologies that are changing very quickly, are dropping in cost, are following Moore's Law and that are being integrated into the mainstream (these are called 'exponential technologies').

The comments so far in Y Combinator refer to a lot of "disconnected ideas". 3D printing is expensive at the moment but we believe it will become so cheap in the next decade that it will become obliquitous to the point that farmers in remote areas of the planet could request from their cellphones replacement parts for a broken tractor just by taking a picture of the broken part and an Artificial Intelligence component would analyze the image, determine what is broken and send to a 3D printer in a shipping container a request for it to be printed, billed to the customer and sent to their dynamic GPS location on their cellphone (sound familiar??) -- this is where the analog was realized and we joined efforts to build the project together.

Shipping containers are being considered also by ARIA since last year when the concept was first conceived as they are very easily found worldwide and are extremely cheap. There are over 600 million containers being used each year for the global transport of raw materials and products across the planet, ARIA saw shipping containers as the building block of a standardized structure that could be used as a ground station to host vehicles and recharge batteries. Because these containers would be located in areas of no roads, they would have to use renewable energy sources to charge batteries that power the UAVs that fly in a 10Km radius.

The network of shipping containers thus becomes also a distributed micro-grid that is smart and that can route packages from one station to another. Think of it as The Pony Express 2.0 .

As you can see, there are many ideas being put together and we are working hard at this at ARIA.

[bambax]

> The comments so far in Y Combinator...

You're confusing Y Combinator with Hacker News; they're related but different.

The video is poor because it's inconsistent; it starts by saying that Reallocate aims to "solve specific humanitarian issues" and then explains that the first project is to build statues of people attending Burning Man and delivering them via what appears to be AR Drones from Parrot.

Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?

There's nothing wrong with building 3D sculptures of people at Burning Man; but it's bizarre to call this a humanitarian endeavor -- even if "in the next decade" this technology may be used to order parts for "broken tractors".

Also, the speaker in the video talks too fast and drops her voice at the end of sentences, making her speech hard to hear / difficult to engage with.

[stcredzero]

> The video is poor because it's inconsistent; it starts by saying that Reallocate aims to "solve specific humanitarian issues" and then explains that the first project is to build statues of people attending Burning Man and delivering them via what appears to be AR Drones from Parrot.

Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?

Unfortunately, they only make sense if you've already read articles on Matternet. It's wise not to beta-test infrastructure before it's beta-ready, so customers aren't alienated. A bottle of pills can be expensive to us in the 1st world. They are even more dear in the 3rd. Better to lose some Burner's statue than some patient's prescription.

[monkeytests]

>Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?

I can't help but feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Nowhere in that video did it claim that the Burning Man test run was a pressing humanitarian issue. Its clear this is just to raise awareness/funds in support of the longer-term goal. The "no pressure" field-test aspect of it probably doesn't hurt either.

[arialogistics]

monkeytests,

The 3D statues are perfect analogs for possible delivery services. Many companies in the healthcare sector have begun looking at 3D printing for building pills and prevent counterfeit medicine which is also a huge issue worldwide.

[michaelt]

  using open source UAVs and ReAllocate by trying to 
  solve 'the last mile' problem [...] a network of 
  autonomous vehicles that could be used to deliver 
  high-value goods [...] technologies that are
  changing very quickly, are dropping in cost, are
  following Moore's Law and that are being integrated
  into the mainstream (these are called 'exponential
  technologies').

Interesting. I've heard one of the limiting factors in quadrotor drone technology is battery energy density. You want long range so you add more batteries, then the drone is too heavy to take off. And battery technology doesn't double in performance every 18 months. Would you say this is accurate?

Can a quadrotor drone can outperform a local on a bicycle? Or do you have an alternative technology in mind? What kind of payload and flight range do you think you'll achieve?