Zipline: Disrupting Logistics with Autonomous Drones

[Keenan Wyrobek]  00:01

We can still deliver without getting blown off course. In fact, we can deliver and winds so extreme, small branches are about to start breaking off trees.

 

Thamer  00:10

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. My name is Thamer Abanami, and I’m joined by Albert Shum and we are your hosts for With Intent’s third season.

 

Albert  00:27

This season, we explore the stories and lessons from several designs featured in ID’s lists of 100 greatest designs published by Fortune magazine in 2019 we’ll discuss how the concepts of intentional, responsible and innovative design intersects with some of the selections on the list.

 

Thamer  00:49

We worked together in the tech industry on a variety of complex products and services, Albert. Taking something envisioned to reality is not necessarily easy.

 

Albert  01:00

It’s definitely not easy at the same time, it’s one of the more exciting parts of design, being able to work on what ifs a v1–that initial concept of what it could be. It’s like cutting cubes out of fog. You’re not quite sure what the problem is. You’re not quite sure where you’re headed, and you’re just jumping in.

 

Thamer  01:21

It’s definitely, it’s definitely not a straight line.

 

Albert  01:24

It’s lot of dead end sometimes. But also when you make that breakthrough, when you find that solution, I think that’s really rewarding, and ultimately it is about making impact. So for today, what are we covering, Thamer?

 

Thamer  01:39

Today, we’re diving into the story of Zipline, a company revolutionizing healthcare logistics with autonomous drone delivery. Millions of people die annually due to the lack of access to basic medical products, and Zipline is working to solve this problem, and their impact could expand far beyond healthcare. Our conversation today is going to be in three main parts, we’re going to talk about the back story, we’re going to talk about the solution, and then we’re going to reflect on some insights from our conversation. To truly understand the story of Zipline, we first need to grasp the global challenge they’re addressing. So let’s dive into the context. More than 4 billion people live in rural areas with limited healthcare access, and in some countries, rural populations travel 10 times longer to access healthcare compared to urban counterparts. 2 billion people globally lack access to essential medicines, and children under five in rural areas are twice as likely to die from preventable diseases. One of the problems here is health care, access, what are some of the key challenges?

 

Albert  02:43

Yeah, Thamer, when you went over those statistics, it’s unimaginable. It’s such a the scale of the problem. While there’s people’s lives on the line and in rural areas, in these underserved communities, transportation costs can be 50 to 100% higher than urban areas, and the problem really stems from a couple of key areas. One is just poor infrastructure. The reason it’s hard to get healthcare access is just lack of roads, like unreliable electricity, and you don’t necessarily have ability to store medicine and cold storage to keep it at the right temperature. An example is 25% of vaccines are wasted annually because you cannot keep them at the right temperature. That just astounding to me, the reality we are confronted today with healthcare delivery.

 

Thamer  03:39

This really does highlight the urgent need for innovative solutions. As part of our research, we were able to meet with David Sarley, a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation. He provides a vivid picture of the some of the access challenges, especially in rural areas in some countries,

 

David Sarley  03:58

In countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia, which huge, but just the road infrastructure is just atrocious, and during the rainy season, it’s impossible. It could take 10 hours to take a trip that would normally take an hour. And so having deliveries that can be made irrespective of the weather conditions and the conditions of the road are fantastic.

 

Albert  04:19

David really puts the problem into perspective, and we should explore how Zipline their approach in tackling this enormous challenge. It’s, it’s, uh, where do you start?

 

Thamer  04:32

I think you start with some people. Zipline was started in 2014, and let’s talk about the CEO, Keller Renaudo Cliffton. His background is in economics and biotechnology, where he built computers out of RNA and DNA that operate in human cells. And he published this research in this publication called Nature Biotechnology, being one of the youngest authors, or first authors, in that publication’s history, but he was also a nationally ranked professional rock climber.

 

Albert  05:02

I guess DNA and rock climbing there’s a connection there somewhere.

 

Thamer  05:05

Yeah, I think there’s a connection somewhere, but it looks there’s a lot of diverse passions and interests here. Very entrepreneurial person. He started a robotics company for a home consumer robot, and it received funding. But later he thought that this was not the right problem to solve, and wanted to aim for something more impactful, which led to this refocus and the idea of Zipline, an autonomous drone delivery concept. Technically, the skies are a less complex problem than roads. An autonomous drone might be a simpler problem than autonomous car.

 

Albert  05:41

Well, it sounds like he pivoted and adapted to the problem area that he wanted to focus on.

 

Thamer 05:47

It seems so… during a trip to Tanzania, he and some colleagues encountered a database, and this database recorded preventable deaths, a majority of them were due to a lack of access to medical supplies. You kind of partner that fact with the fact that a lot of medical supplies are sitting in warehouses going bad because of logistics issues, they were motivated to build a healthcare logistics solution where autonomous drones provided a new frontier to solve this problem, especially this access problem that we discussed. Here’s Keller Renaudo Cliffton explaining the driving force behind their mission.

 

[Keller Renaudo Cliffton]  06:27

There’s a transformation coming in logistics. Over the last decade, global demand for instant delivery has skyrocketed, but the technology we’re using to deliver is 100 years old. We’re still using the same 3000 pound gas combustion vehicles driven by humans to make billions of deliveries that usually weigh less than five pounds. This is slow, it’s expensive and it’s terrible for the planet. Eight years ago, we asked ourselves, what would delivery look like if we re imagined it to be 10 times as fast, zero emission and accessible to everyone on Earth. That kind of logistics system would save lives and reshape global commerce. That seemed so incredibly important that we had to at least try to build it.

 

Thamer 07:16

It’s a powerful vision, and it faced a lot of early challenges and skepticism, but through the development approach, iterative prototyping, learning from mistakes, and real-world testing, but also, most importantly, finding the ideal first partner, they were able to succeed. Albert, could you talk a little bit about their deployment in Rwanda?

 

Albert  07:39

Yeah, the Rwanda deployment. It’s truly fascinating in terms of how Zipline’s founder were able to turn their vision in reality by overcoming some real-world tests. Zipline launched in 2016 focusing on blood delivery in Rwanda with 21 hospitals, they wisely and fortunately had the support of the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, who had the vision to understand the potential of Zipline, drone delivery system to solve medical delivery response time. So I think that, I think that leadership support from the Rwanda government was one real key, though it did have initial hiccups. I think back to a startup. When you jump in to create a new solution like drone delivery in a new area like Rwanda, they were only able to initially scale one hospital in its first nine months, and they had to figure out again all these different constraints in a country that didn’t have a lot of healthcare infrastructure. But over time, they were able to deliver to all 21 hospital and by 2019 and this was amazing fact, they were able to deliver 75% of Rwanda’s blood supply outside the capital Wow, and decreased blood expiration rates by 67% that’s that’s just a again, real proof that having a focus understanding constraint and Having a support of the Rwanda government Zipline was able to create a real solution with real impact. And here’s David Sarley talking a bit more about why Rwanda was such a good fit for Zipline’s initial deployment.

 

David Sarley  09:35

You know, the really fascinating thing with the story is because you could now centralize your blood in one location, and you could literally get the blood to wherever it was needed within the country within like 30 minutes, 40 minutes, you know, you had a government that saw the potential advantages of the approach and because it had Presidential interest and approval they were able to get through the regulatory hurdles. I mean, they were no less concerned about safety than the FAA, you know, the Rwandan equivalent of the Civil Aviation Authority, you know, was concerned about the possibility of drones crashing, carrying blood. I mean, that would be a biohazard, right? And so they put on very careful restrictions. So you had to stay away from the airfield. You had to plot the routes in such a way that that you’re going to minimize the chances of crashing into in a kind of dense urban setting, until they could actually see the evidence on the safety.

 

Thamer  10:39

So the solution didn’t stop at Rwanda, right? Albert, it went past Rwanda.

 

Albert  10:43

Yeah, I think today, Rwanda is not the only market. Zipline’s in. They are deployed now in Ghana, Japan, United States, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Kenya. And with the US being a new market. They’re also looking to expand to commercial partnerships with Walmart for retail delivery and continue to work with us healthcare providers for medical supplies, expanding the range of healthcare products they can deliver, from vaccines to blood to insulin to cancer treatments, infusions and transfusion. Now, those are remarkable achievements, especially for a startup in this challenging area of medical access. We should really dive deep into their solution and the technology that enabled the system. Thamer, can you share more about not just the design of the drones, but how the drones themselves work, and why they were so critical in the solution.

 

Thamer 11:49

Absolutely. Albert, I think what’s interesting about Zipline is they have two main platforms for drones for different environments. There’s platform one, which is targeted for rural and remote areas. And platform two, which is targeted towards urban environments. Let’s talk about platform one. I want you to picture a white fixed wing aircraft about the size of a large coffee table. It’s got a wingspan of about 10 feet. It has a very slender fuselage in the center, pretty sleek design. It’s super sleek. It looks like a miniature airliner, but there are no windows, and has a distinctive V shaped tail at the rear, and the whole body is made of lightweight, durable materials. So it looks like it’s a futuristic it just doesn’t look like, you know, it looks futuristic, almost like a spacecraft. Has two small propellers on each wing, there’s one propeller, and they’re very they’re designed to be quiet. So there was a lot of consideration that is counter to what you see on a lot of drones today.

 

Albert  12:52

Yeah, and I’d be called, it’s also painted white, so it’s not, it feels, hopefully not threatening. It feels, very neutral.

 

Thamer 12:58

And yeah, and this threatening point. I think there’s sound and there’s visual design here at play, and we’ll also discuss that more as we get into platform two. But on platform one, it covers about 100 miles round trip, which is a great range, right? Yeah, because you have this rural delivery problem, it can cruise up to 80 miles an hour, carries a payload of four pounds. And what’s interesting about this, and different than a lot of the drones, it has an interesting launch and recovery system.

 

Albert  13:27

It’s almost like an aircraft carrier launch system,

 

Thamer  13:29

Yes! you got it. So it has a catapult launcher for takeoff and a hook and wire system for precise landings. And my favorite part is deliveries are dropped by parachute.

 

Albert  13:43

It’s like a stork flying over.

 

Thamer 13:46

Yes, yes. It can target a spot the size of a parking spot, which is pretty impressive. Now, when we get into platform two, this is your precision drone design for urban deliveries. It’s very different. It has two parts. So at Zipline, they call the drone, they call it a Zip. So platform one, we just talked about the Zip. Now we’re in platform two, it’s two parts. There’s the Zip itself, and then there’s something called the Droid. So the Zip itself, or the drone in its cargo bay holds the Droid, and Droid in its cargo bay holds the package. And what connects these two things is a very thin wire. And so I want you to imagine a larger drone with a central body and arms extending outward, but it also has wings, so it has this hybrid appearance, where these outward, extending arms have propellers like helicopters, but also has wings like a plane, It’s part plane, part helicopter.

 

Albert  14:49

So does it hover, or does it continue to fly?

 

Thamer 14:52

It could do both. It can do vertical take off and landing, but it can also fly like a plane. Now I want you to imagine this Droid that we just spoke about, they took inspiration from sea mammals to make it look non threatening. The cargo bay doors open and suspended via thin cable. This droid descends. This Now note this drone is hovering 300 feet of Bell view, slowly descending. Is this non-threatening looking thing, this thing coming down, yes, and it touches the ground, and then it opens its cargo doors, revealing this package. And then you don’t see the package until the droid is pulled up by the main drone, and then it reveals that it left a package for you. It’s pretty magical. They want it to feel like teleportation, right?

 

Albert  15:41

It just appears and then quietly disappears.

 

Thamer  15:44

Yes for this urban delivery, they want something that took hours or a day to take minutes, and it can target the size, or a target size of about a picnic table.

 

Albert  15:57

So it’s much more accurate than the platform one system, right?

 

Thamer 16:00

Yeah, I think you have a different problem here with urban environments that requires a lot more precision, a lot more managing how you’re going to deliver in crowded areas. That’s why. What’s unique about the droid is not only does it descend from a cable, but it also has its own thrust system to maneuver it

 

Albert  16:18

So you can kind of navigate and adjust to the changing environment?

 

Thamer 16:22

Totally, in changing environment and also, they’ve designed these drones to operate in 90th percentile weather conditions, so in high winds, these are still stable and trying to deliver to a target the size of a picnic table.

 

Albert  16:36

Wow, that’s a amazing feat of engineering product design.

 

Thamer 16:39

Yeah, I’d love to cut to zipline. CTO Keenan Wyrobek as he explains the innovative design of platform two.

 

[Keenan Wyrobek]  16:48

There are many innovations working behind the scenes to make this kind of precision possible. One of the biggest is the ability of not just the drone to be autonomous, but the Droid as well. The Droid’s up and down motion is precisely controlled by a winch, and its side to side motion is controlled by small integrated fans in the Droid itself, the droid autonomy is all powered by its own onboard sensors. That level of control means that even in high winds, and it’s quite windy right now, we can still deliver without getting blown off course. In fact, we can deliver and wind so extreme, small branches are about to start breaking off trees. The little Droid is the only thing that comes to the ground for delivery, leaving the Zip hovering so high up you barely notice it.

 

Thamer 17:39

Albert, can you tell us about the broader logistics system Zipline has developed?

 

Albert  17:44

Yeah, in some ways, zipline again, as a startup, it was really ambitious. Not only do you have to create the drone system, like you mentioned, with high accuracy and long range, but you also have to think about the entire infrastructure and logistics, the whole system. I think the drone itself is about 15% of the innovation, whereas 85% of the innovation, the investment that Zipline made was focused on logistics. That’s really the magic, the ability to deliver a package on demand at the right time, right place, end to end logistics system. Medical supplies require making sure you keep at the right temperature. It requires Cold Chain Management, and Zipline had to figure that out. Also, all these innovation highlights the importance of logistics, and here’s David Sarley discussing how Zipline has solved some of these logistical problems for the better.

 

David Sarley  18:48

What Zipline did was to change the calculus around how and when you can replenish so rather than wait every three months until you place the order in the truck, you know what If you could order daily, even in 50, 60, 70 miles, may only take 30 minutes to get a delivery. And so you could literally see how many children have shown up for your immunization session, and then say, place an order that we’re going to immunize 30 kids and send that order into Zipline and get that order replenished within 30, 40 minutes. And so that stops you having to have a fridge full of stuff. And by the way, electricity is a problem, and you might have solar panels, other solar panels maintained, and what is the chances of a catastrophic failure of the fridge equipment, the cold chain equipment. You’re taking all of that uncertainty out and then introducing a system which is certain and has been more flexible. And then the other thing, which was the unanticipated consequence, was you could start to offer more services at the primary health care level without the patient having been told, well, no, we don’t have that commodity, you have to take the transport into the closest town to go to the closest hospital.

 

Thamer 20:15

So we talked about the origin story of Zipline, and then we discussed the design and technical solutions of the drones and end to end logistics. This is the part of our episode where we reflect and discuss insights, and there’s a lot to unpack here. Albert, can we start with Zipline’s innovative culture, and what stands out to you?

 

Albert  20:35

I think culture is so important to talk about, especially in regards to a company like Zipline, where its mission is so compelling, zipline has a sense of ruthless practicality, meaning it really focused on creating practical solutions over theoretical perfection. I think that sometimes, especially as designers, we have this tendency to be perfectionists, to want to make sure the design is perfect before we actually try it out or start building it. I think the Zipline team was taking more of a learn it by doing it, approach and embracing failure as part of that innovation process, jumping into Rwanda, knowing that, hey, it doesn’t have a lot of infrastructure. It doesn’t have live resources, and that’s why you’re actually there. So overcoming those setbacks and building on those learnings, I think that’s that’s really key to its culture of success.

 

Thamer  21:34

Yeah, in the research Renaudo talks about that, they start when they’re addressing a problem, they start with the assumption that they’re dumb, and they try to use hypotheses and prototyping to learn their way out of a problem. An example of this is when they were trying to figure out this problem of collision avoidance. They didn’t go with some giant, advanced tech solution like light our radar. One of the engineers said, I think this is probably a really dumb idea, but maybe we should just prototype it. And they found out that using very inexpensive microphone arrays paired with data sets on what aircraft sounded like, was able to give them a very cheap, simple, lightweight and energy efficient solution in electric drone that actually got FAA chapter 135 or Part 135 certification. So I think what you just said about the culture of ruthless practicality and learning by doing, and it really is different than what you see a lot of the big tech drone manufacturers approaching the problem space.

 

Albert  22:39

Totally I think bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better in this sense, when you’re trying to solve very highly constrained problems, and being resourceful is so critical. But also, I think Zipline team had this sense of urgency in its culture that it’s working on life saving solutions, and that really gave the team purpose and provided a culture that attracted key talent because its mission was so important. In addition to culture, I think Thamer, there was this idea of innovation abled by underserved environments. Could you share more thoughts on this area?

 

Thamer 23:20

Yeah, I think if Zipline stayed in the United States and never left the borders of this country, they would not have been able to develop this technology. And it was really their partnership with Rwanda on solving real problems for that country that really gave them the ability to achieve a breakthrough in what they were trying to achieve. They had the right partner at the right time.

 

Albert  23:46

It’s also, it’s getting out your comfort zone. I feel , it’s easy to say, like, oh, like, Hey, we’re in Silicon Valley, or wherever your company is located. Let’s just focus on what’s around us.

 

Thamer  23:57

100%. And it was the Rwandans, themselves, health officials in the Ministry of Health that guided Zipline to where they should start, and it was blood and the impact is real. The number of 88% reduction in maternal post-partum bleeding deaths is a real impact, and it’s really a partnership between the health authorities in Rwanda and Zipline around how they got started. So that is one of the facets of this idea of innovating in an underserved environment and the partnerships required there. But also there are other advantages, starting in areas where there is not a lot of traditional infrastructure that services needs. There’s this concept of leapfrogging traditional infrastructure by bypassing older technologies. So now in Rwanda, you have this very complex and very advanced logistics system that delivers, not only healthcare products, but now also delivers solutions for malnourishment and animal husbandry, for farmers and more coming. Yeah, you’ve seen this also in the example of countries that may have not had fixed line phone infrastructure jump to cellular phones, right?. And so we had the fortune of connecting with Andre Nogueira, who’s the CEO of Leap and associate faculty in design knowledge at the School of Nursing at Johns Hopkins University. And here’s what he had to say to help us understand some of the examples of where this leapfrogging happens and how it happens.

 

Andre Nogueira  25:27

A similar example of that would be India and the embedded finance with the whole country jumping credit card technology and utilizing phones to conduct monetary transactions, right? So I think that a technology like this can come to help us ask the question, is this a step by step progress model? Where for us to reach this current infrastructure in technology, we have to go through the previous steps? Or, can we jump some of these steps and learn from what has happened and for what and make a more informed choice that we don’t want this here,

 

Thamer  26:16

this also just represents a fundamental paradigm shift in logistics and healthcare. Albert and I’d love to kind of get your thoughts on how to think about that

 

Albert  26:27

Zipline created a leapfrog, a fundamental shift in terms of how healthcare logistics can be rethought–this idea of going from bulk delivery these big trucks with all the supplies, taking, if not days, sometimes months, to deliver medical supplies, to be able to deliver on demand. That’s such a breakthrough, and it requires both a rethinking of decentralizing the distribution so that you can have better access to remote areas, to this idea of potential healthcare solutions that can be expanded with these new logistical systems to areas like E commerce, agriculture and even emergency response. So it’s a least for me, it’s been a great learning about how zipline rethought and reinvented healthcare delivery. Thamer,, I think we should talk more also about regulation and especially emerging technology. There’s this need to balance progress with concerns. Can you share more about your thoughts on this topic?

 

Thamer  27:44

Regulation is really important here. Zipline to their credit, are pro regulation and want to work closely with regulators to help them understand the space that they are regulating. Otherwise, you might get regulations that may not achieve their intended outcomes, or worse, you get regulations that could create negative outcomes. The ability of technology to be ahead of regulation in many cases, is noteworthy, and it can create also some problems. In our conversation with Andre, we’ve learned about this concept called regulatory fractures.

 

Andre Nogueira  28:17

It’s very hard for us to anticipate all of these externalities until it they are happening, right? So Saskia Sassen which is a fantastic intellectual Argentinian, she has this concept that she calls regulatory fractures, and she said that there are fractures within our regulatory framework that usually technology development navigates through those fractures, as water go through underground and until things are Flooding become hard for us to see.

 

Albert  29:01

Another mportant matter is this idea of equity and access, making sure that technology benefits all segments society, not just the affluent. And David Sarley raises a really important point about this area.

 

David Sarley  29:19

You know, we live in a an economy that’s in a fantastically productive and innovative and wealthy but there are pockets of poverty or under development within, within King County, for example, and so, you know, making sure that drones don’t end up just delivering pizza to, you know, to people that can pay premium prices for the delivery and not serving clinics in South King County or to the concept of the less less affluent.

 

Thamer  29:51

this idea came up also in our conversation with Andre. Here’s his concern as well.

 

Andre Nogueira  29:58

So just to reinforce is that, like if we continue to use that same model that inform 20th Century technology adoption, we might exacerbate the inequities that we have today, because we will have greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few of those owning and controlling the development and the use of this technology,

 

Albert  30:25

I think sometimes in design, we have these ambitious goals and big visions, but how do you get from vision to reality? Zipline really is a showcase of making sure that you’re taking a pragmatic approach, but also really addressing the entire system, and not just focus on the technology. So in some ways, the Zipline the story is about how it was able to implement, but really it’s about the impact on people’s lives that they delivered. And it’s truly an inspiring story.

 

Thamer  30:59

Let’s end with this thought from Rwandan President Paul Kagame, which really encapsulates the transformative potential of this work.

 

[Paul Kagame]  31:08

We are looking at three things really coming together. It’s about people, it’s about technology. It’s about the innovations in between, to make things work to improve people’s lives, if you will. The beauty of it, the moment you make one step forward and you see there is progress, then you even want to do more every time, at every stage. I was always convinced, much as I wasn’t necessarily sure that something good can come out of it. Universal Access to delivery is responding to the needs. If we believe we can change things and move as fast as we can to where others are, is serving well society. That’s what people really want.

 

Thamer  32:22

And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of With Intent. We hope this deep dive into Zipline was inspiring and informative. Thank you, Albert, for partnering with me on this episode. Thank you, Thamer. We want to give a big thanks to the faculty and staff at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, as well as David sarley and Andre Noguera for their help in helping us understand the story, and dimensions beyond just drones and logistics. We also would like to thank Zipline for their permission to use parts of their 2023 keynote to help tell the story. With Intent is a production of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, and it is part of its Latham Fellows Program. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you next time.