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East Africa Leads The World In Drone Delivery (cnn.com)
"While plenty of countries have dabbled in drone delivery, no program has matched the scale and impact of what's unfolding in Rwanda and now, Tanzania." An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
The drones will fly themselves, far from the view of humans -- a move that's not yet legal in the U.S... In early 2018, Tanzania's government will begin using drones to deliver medical supplies such as blood and vaccines to remote areas. The government expects to save lives thanks to faster delivery of medical supplies. Rwanda has already completed 1,400 similar deliveries. "Everyone has this paradigm that robotics and artificial intelligence starts in the U.S., made by rich people for rich people. It couldn't be farther from the truth," said Keller Rinaudo, CEO of Zipline, which is supplying the drones. "There's a major shift [occurring] where it's not about the country with the most resources; it's more about the countries with modern regulatory reform and a willingness to try new things."
Tanzania will open four drone distribution centers with Silicon Valley startup Zipline, providing more than 100 drones and 2,000 flights a day. It's also discussing a partnership with another drone company... Previously, the government delivered medical supplies only four times a year due to costs. Bwanakunu envisions several deliveries per week including for emergencies... This isn't the first time East Africa has been a step in front of the "developed world." "We were ahead with mobile money too," said Bwanakunu, referring to M-PESA, which allows for money to be sent through cell phones. "If today trying this technology will save a human life, why not?"
Each drone is equipped with "a parachute that deploys if that anything goes wrong."
Tanzania will open four drone distribution centers with Silicon Valley startup Zipline, providing more than 100 drones and 2,000 flights a day. It's also discussing a partnership with another drone company... Previously, the government delivered medical supplies only four times a year due to costs. Bwanakunu envisions several deliveries per week including for emergencies... This isn't the first time East Africa has been a step in front of the "developed world." "We were ahead with mobile money too," said Bwanakunu, referring to M-PESA, which allows for money to be sent through cell phones. "If today trying this technology will save a human life, why not?"
Each drone is equipped with "a parachute that deploys if that anything goes wrong."
Pharmaceuticals, weapons, drone delivery...
That's about right... outsourcing industry formerly dominated domestically by hungry students, prisoners, and members of the military.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
Lack of services and infrastructure, and in some cases higher safety risk, shift the cost benefit analysis toward drone use. Not that surprising.
Eastasia?
It's also a good thing that they can leapfrog over those things. If they had to develop landlines, motorways, and all of the same other types of infrastructure to get to where most western countries are at, they'd never catch up. It also lets them build some expertise that they can export which is going to go a long way towards helping them economically. I would assume that drone delivers will eventually make economic sense even in markets where alternatives exist and are inexpensive, but right now it's not enough to justify the investment to roll it out on a wide scale.
I cant' think of any sci-fi book or movie that anticipated our skies filled with mad buzzing drones flying around delivering stuff, and maybe killer drones shooting them down or pirate drones bagging them and making off with the loot.
Closest I can think of was Dark Angel, but those were police surveillance drones, not commercial drones.
That's the future for you, always pulling something out of its ass.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
"There's a major shift [occurring] where it's not about the country with the most resources; it's more about the countries with modern regulatory reform and a willingness to try new things."
A good news story from this part of the world this is very unusual. This is very welcome news.
I personally thought that this part of the world was very desolate till I visited years ago. Good that Slashdot is highlighting an encouraging story as well.
One thing I learnt is that life continues even in places where the likes of main stream media do not cover...or choose to cover negative aspects of - and folks there seem or apear to be happier.
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
Competition is a huge part of it. I can Fedex something anywhere in the country overnight, so a drone system isn't much of an improvement. (It might get it to someplace very remote a few hours earlier or more cheaply, but that's it. So there's value, but it's not as huge a gap as from four-times-a-year to several-times-per-week).
Regulations are another very real part. The more complex a regulation, the larger a barrier to entry for a new technology. Even if every regulation is there for a reason it takes a lot of time and money to try to find a way through them, and it may be impossible or impractical to have the regulations changed quickly enough to make a business model work.
And of course there's founder drive. People may realize they can save more lives in Africa and that's what they want to do and what they've sold to their investors.
Real lawyers write in C++
Each year about 1.3 million people are killed in traffic accidents, times more badly wounded: http://www.who.int/gho/road_sa... . These are the figures consistent with a World War.
Deliveries by RPAS could free roads and save millions of lives. It is much safer to move in a 3D space than in a 2D one.
Documents, cash, small parcels, etc. could be well delivered by air right now if it were not for the prohibitive over-regulation.
Developing our infrastructure takes a toll on the environment as well. If these African nations can bypass the stage with modern technology, they might invent and evolve new forms of living with the nature and building developed economies and advanced technologies over a minimally disturbed ecosystem. Now if only human and societal development would be faster in certain countries, the things they could do. Even if the rules of physics or so called reality would say otherwise, the goal is worth pursuing.
One thing I learnt is that life continues even in places where the likes of main stream media do not cover...or choose to cover negative aspects of - and folks there seem or apear to be happier.
People who live in those places are dirt poor dung farmers and mainstream media does not cover them because nobody cares if an ugly unshaven sow lets a teat slip.
It also lets them build some expertise that they can export which is going to go a long way towards helping them economically..
This is fantasy. We're talking about Africa here. The entire thing will be run by outsiders without the Africans themselves having jack shit to do with it.
You did notice the "Silicon Valley startup Zipline" part, right?
What are the odds that all those drones will be intercepted/stolen in the first two weeks?
In Rwanda the drone is captured. They use a net and break of the turbo, then smash him with a rock to break his shell. They wish to eat the meat inside and capture his spirit power.
A good news story from this part of the world this is very unusual.
Maybe not that unusual, but very logical, Mr. Spock.
It that area of the world, people bonk each other on the head with clubs for not being in the same tribe as themselves. Thus, if you work as a deliveryman, you might end up making a delivery to someone from a different tribe, and you might get bonked on the head with a club. So working as a deliveryman around those parts is a fatally dangerous job.
So the lack of folks willing to work doing deliveries there drives the demand for drones!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
We need to export our bureaucrats and lobbyists there right away, forming a Deep State that can tie down every technological initiative with an unbreakable mesh of monopolies and regulations that reinforce each other so that nothing gets done. Replace every flash of initiative with a California style treadmill of wheedling for permits.
And if we find that some East Texas patent troll has not been paid its danegeld, we can send in the bunker-busters.
...Tanzania has 25% more land area than Texas with a GDP similar to South Dakota. So once you get away from the cities it's big and relatively poor.
What they do have is a good network of dirt airstrips. So when the VFR pilots pack up at sunset there's a nice big window when the drones could make their deliveries. It wouldn't take a whole lot of effort to define some rules to minimise drone on drone collisions by correlating height with heading, and/or defining traffic routes.
If we're talking about small 'high value' packages like drugs and vaccines the drones would probably need to fly above 5000 feet to minimise the risk of (7.62mm) lead contamination. They might also need a decent inertial guidance system because I wouldn't be surprised to find GPS jammers appearing on the ground if loss of position signal resulted in the emergency parachute deploying.
There might be a few losses due to wildlife on the landing strip, but apart from that it sounds pretty feasible.
If these African nations can bypass the stage with modern technology, they might invent and evolve new forms of living with the nature and building developed economies and advanced technologies over a minimally disturbed ecosystem.
Sounds like Heaven - right here and now, in Tanzania did they say? I'm packing up and heading there - what are their immigration laws like?
Oh wait, I just saw the "if" and "might" - are we in the future tense here?
I personally thought that this part of the world was very desolate till I visited years ago. .... One thing I learnt is that life continues even in places where the likes of main stream media do not cover...
You did not think that life continues in places the media does not cover? You need to visit a place personally to know there is life there? That's ridiculous.
Locally known as bribing government figures...
I think its equally likely that Africa's land will simply get bought up and used by outsiders in neocolonial fashion. China recently bought up some huge percentage of the arable land in Madagascar, for example. With populations still increasing, and food availability to get more shaky due to climate change, nations will start putting pressure on Africa to get land deals in place to feed their own populations.
Yeah,I lived there a long time ago (1990's). I even had the idea,being an avid RC plane nerd, of equipping them with an auto pilot as had been available for RC helicopters for a couple of decades and using them as remote location drug delivery vehicles. But I never had the time nor resources. Now you buy complete electronics packages for under $100, drop them in a senior telemaster and deliver 5kg of supplies 1000km away for a few dollars a trip.
It's not without precedent, even fifteen years ago. (He was successful)
Except they are purchasing the hardware and services from Zipline, not developing them for their own use and export. This does nothing to grow their economy--it just solves a major problem caused by a lack of infrastructure.
Most likely, this will be like most "foreign aid" and the work will be done overseas, and oif they were lucky, the Africans will get the drones before somebody runs off with the money.
America is great and always will be!!
MAGAMAGAMAGA
A while ago I was walking through Footscray - an economically depressed suburb of Melbourne - and I saw someone had scrawled on a wall the words HELLAS MAKEDONIA RULES".
"It sure does," I thought. "It rules about six inches of space on a wall in Footscray."
Because that doesn't happen in the developed world...
> Each drone is equipped with "a parachute that deploys if that anything goes wrong."
I've worked in East Africa (including Tanzania) and a parachute won't do you any good when the drone goes down 5 miles from the nearest road, in the middle of nowhere.
If you're incredibly lucky, a Maasai will find it and bring it somewhere. Otherwise, maybe offering a cash reward for someone to find it, but most locals don't have a smartphone and thus no way to navigate to specific GPS coordinates.
The fact is Rwanda is tiny compared to Tanzania, and the population density is much higher. I'd be thrilled if these work in Tanzania, but I'm cautiously pessimistic given what I know of the country from first hand experience.
Making a generalisation of an entire continent with a staggering range of countries of various levels of development is not a particularly wise endeavour.
There's not that much arable land left in Madagascar. Hopefully the Chinese can do a better job preserving it than the natives.
The natives have a cycle of farming on a plot of land over and over until theres no nutrients left then burning the top soil for fuel. They're basically turning their island into a desert one plot at a time. Sad.
As delivery drones fly, they capture all they see on the ground, facial recognition, sell it to data aggregators and TMZ. That's what will get them going in the U.S., air-safety be damned. Money, money, money. Look! there you are, using your lunch break to visit a motel! To stop us from posting who you were with, just text $300 to blackmail of the future.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Isn't it actually spelled "FYROM"?
Ezekiel 23:20
Sure it does, only much less.
Ezekiel 23:20
The US is a wonderful place for innovators... as long as they don't want to do anything too risky, or in any way even remotely derivative. The legal structure within the US has become so antagonistic towards anyone who experiments with technology, that the very second something goes awry, and (as an example) a drone randomly falls out of the sky, a dozen ambulance-chasing lawyers pounce out of the nearby brush and start screaming, "Lawsuit! Lawsuit! Wait -- can we make this a class action lawsuit? Even better!" But to make matters worse, sometimes nothing actually goes awry, and the very real potential for a profitable venture starts to peak over the horizon... at which point a different group of lawyers eagerly leap to the ready, and these lawyers are screaming, "Patent! Trademark! Perpetual royalties! Lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit!!"
Thus, our litigation centric society sometimes forces innovators to take their ball and glove, and go play in somebody elses backyard. And..... who exactly is surprised by this?
Shit, dude, I'd go so far as to say that anything is attractive when you live in a country that isn't constantly being attacked by a giant orange turd.
I would argue, much less low level corruption, i.e. bribing your police, but at the upper levels, we probably have it just as much; they're just better at hiding it.
The Chinese might have more sophisticated farming techniques than Africans, but to hold them up as examples of ecological efficiency is misguided. The food grown in Africa to support the Chinese factory worker, in turn, supports the Chinese factory. And part of that Chinese factory money goes back to pull more resources out of mines in Africa, which are worse than any farming.