Drone Delivery Start-Up Zipline Beats Amazon, UPS And FedEx To The Punch | CNBC
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites Zipline as an example of a drone company doing meaningful work with a fixed-base delivery approach.
What it is
A short CNBC report on Zipline, which has delivered medical supplies by drone in Rwanda since 2016 and is preparing to start in the U.S.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Cites walrus01 · 2018-11 · on “Falcon Heavy Model – Flight 1 [video]”
What I find interesting about this is that in the RC and drone building and flying community, you have generally two categories of aircraft: a) Aircraft that are designed to be a faithful scale model of a real thing, with all of the intricate modeling and painting work that goes into it. For example there's a person who built a model of an Antonov 225: [LINK] You can find flying B-29 models, jet airliner models, etc. and then b) Aircraft that are designed for a dedicated purpose and look nothing like anything that exists in the 1:1 scale aviation world, such as the "Believer" foam first-person-video plane: [LINK] where (b) includes other clean sheet of paper designs like Zipline's blood bank
Cites sgtnoodle · 2020-09 · on “Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?”
I've been working at Zipline for over four years now. We're building a scalable and reliable UAV based delivery system with a focus on making medical supplies accessible to all humans that need them. We're operating distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, and North Carolina, and I believe we're still the only such system operating in production. I'm an embedded software engineer, and I work on a lot on the firmware running in the vehicles, as well as in all the various ground equipment we've developed to make our system easier to operate. I also touch a lot of "high level" python to build out developer tools and when interfacing to the company's broader software stacks. It's important for our
Cites tonyarkles · 2023-07 · on “DJI Drone Rescue Map”
Yeah, for sure! That's exactly the approach that Zipline has taken: [this video] There are some practicality points to it. For example, their system works awesome when you have a fixed base but might be impractical when launching with gear that's towable with half-ton truck.