Californian firm Zipline is poised to expand its delivery service in Africa dedicated to the shipment of medical supplies with what could be the world’s largest drone delivery operation in Tanzania.
After launching a service in October last year to deliver blood bags to 21 hospitals nationwide in Rwanda, in the centre of the continent, the robotics start-up is planning to extend its reach to neighbouring Tanzania early in 2018, according to reports in the international media. An official announcement is expected to be issued later today.
Zipline's drones are called 'zips' and take off and land at the ‘Nest’, and make deliveries by descending close to the ground and ‘air dropping’ medicine via a mini-parachute system to a designated spot called a ‘mailbox’ near the health centres they serve.
Wired.com, who recently interviewed Zipline's founder and CEO, Keller Rinaudo, said the company has so far performed about 1,400 deliveries in Rwanda, about a quarter of them in emergencies. Its drones have racked up more than 60,000 flight miles, delivering blood to areas ground vehicles can’t reach quickly, or at all during the rainy season that turns roads to mud.
Now Zipline is looking to set up the world’s largest national drone delivery service in Tanzania where the government wants to make as many as 2,000 daily deliveries from four distribution centres.
For the new service, it plans to fly upgraded versions of its fixed-wing drones, which have a 6-foot wingspan and can cruise at 70 mph. Each can carry 3 pounds of cargo (one unit of blood weighs roughly 1.2 pounds), and the batteries can make a round trip of 100 miles.
Folded wax paper parachutes and cardboard cargo bays make the drones both durable and cheap to operate and repair.
“The new vehicle is highly modular," Rinaudo said. "If a sensor is giving weird readings, it’s super fast to replace that."
Tanzania's first distribution centre served by drones is earmarked to be located in the capital, Dodoma, and is expected to be operational early in 2018. It will be followed by a further three, providing nationwide coverage of the country and its 55 million inhabitants.
Tanzania is a considerably bigger operation than what Zipline has put in place in Rwanda whose population is just 12 million.
Each of the four centres will run a fleet of 30 drones, enough for 500 deliveries daily. In addition to blood, they’ll carry emergency vaccines, HIV medications, and supplies like IV tubes, to more than 5,600 public health facilities.
Wired.com's report also quoted Laurean Bwanakunu, director general of Tanzania's medical stores department who said the drones will supplement the government's sporadic overland deliveries.
“That mission can be a challenge during emergencies, times of unexpected demand, bad weather, or for small but critical orders,” Laurean Bwanakunu, director general of the country's medical stores department, said in a statement. “Using drones for just-in-time deliveries will allow us to provide health facilities with complete access to vital medical products no matter the circumstance.”
While Africa is Zipline's focus currently, Rinaudo believes its services could be deployed globally. “Rural healthcare is a huge problem in the US too,” he noted.
However, he underlined the difficulties of launching drone services in the US because of restrictive regulations, with any broad scale operation requiring the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) whose principal concern is to ensure that conventional aircraft activity is not impacted.
Zipline’s investors include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as well as Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Subtraction Capital, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and Stanford University. Last November, the company reported raising $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Visionnaire Ventures.
