5/16/23

Good Gizmos

Good Gizmos

The squirrel-Olympics guy Mark Rober recently posted an inspiring display of drone technology applied to making life-saving deliveries. While he doesn’t normally do sales pitches for third parties, he was clearly smitten with the product thanks to the applied engineering behind it.

The company Zipline makes semi-autonomous delivery drones that have been used in Rwanda for several years now delivering urgent medical supplies to a rural hospital. The entire delivery system, refined over the course of several years, is astonishing in the number of technical challenges the engineers have mastered, including noise, safety, and reusability. Watch:

The video captures the ideas much more succinctly than my words, in this case, including Mark’s obvious enthusiasm. For my part, I am not quite as certain that instantaneous deliveries by way of small autonomous aircraft is necessarily the solution to everything. At some point the skies will reach their carrying capacity, for instance, especially in areas with greater population density. That’s the recurrent tech problem of scalability. It’s hard to imagine thousands of drones overhead delivering snacks and soft drinks to couch potatoes in suburbia without causing massive air-traffic congestion—but what do I know?

Nevertheless, the technique of sending merchandise directly to customers without requiring a human to drive a two-ton vehicle on busy streets surely holds promise, as he says. To me, though, it seems more likely to be offered as a premium-price service for people who can’t wait to receive their wares. If you want that goody from the big-box store but can’t endure the delayed gratification of driving across town for it, the service could be more cost-effective than sending a courier on a bicycle or scooter, say.

Apart from my skepticism, it is all around a pretty nifty idea, I have to admit. The inspirational effect on young, aspiring engineers—in Rwanda and elsewhere—makes the story all the better.