Sade Agard: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome back to another great episode of Lexicon. This is your go to podcast covering everything related to engineering, science and technology, proudly presented by Interest in Engineering. Today we'll be joined by Keenan Wyrobek, the co founder and head of product and engineering at Zipline, the world's first drone delivery service whose focus is delivering life saving medicine to the most difficult to reach places on Earth.

But before we discuss the incredible roles Zipline's drones are playing and how they work. We'd like to remind you to subscribe to our newsletters. Our most popular is the blueprint, which is our daily news digest for all the latest in engineering, science, and tech delivered Monday through Saturday. But now without further ado, let's join our guest Keenan.

Keenan Wyrobek: Sure thing. Great to be with you. My name [00:01:00] is Keenan Wyrobek. I'm the co founder and CTO here at Zipline, which basically means I get to do all the like Cool tech development and product development stuff here at Zipline to enable well, drone delivery at scale. You know, explain what Zipline does.

I like to start from the beginning, which is, where we got our start, millions of people around the world die from lack of access to medical supplies, over 5 million children alone. die every year due to lack of access to medical supplies. And zip line has been on a mission ever since to create the first logistics system that really serves all humans equally to solve that problem at scale.

And we we do that with drone delivery, which is a really amazing and environmentally friendly way to, To provide this this kind of delivery network that can serve everybody.

Sade Agard: Yeah. Thank you so much for elaborating on that. And just for our next question it's probably a little bit obvious, [00:02:00] but could you let us know a little bit more about how your drones work?

We know you've got a couple of models. Could you guide us through what these are and some of the fundamental tech behind them is?

Keenan Wyrobek: Sure. So the first model we were called platform one, so really creative naming. I know. And platform one is it's a very good law. It's the best way to do on demand long range delivery.

So very long range. So picture a large remote control airplane, right? So this is doesn't look like A drone with, with, four rotors or something like that. This is, it looks like a small airplane. And it's great for going from a metro area and serving surrounding towns and cities outside that metro area.

And the way that delivery experience works is that little small airplane flies out to your site. And it drops a package that floats that package down to the ground. Now to picture that package picture. Like a cake box size box with a paper parachute on it. And yeah, that's platform one that just hit, [00:03:00] we just did our, achieved our millionth delivery a few days ago, actually, which is really exciting.

Over a hundred million kilometers flown now on that system around the world.

Sade Agard: Oh, that's really impressive. And when you say long range, what are we talking about here in terms of kilometers? How far can the platform one go?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. So we talk about serving a service radius of about a hundred kilometers.

And and of course, the drone itself can fly out and back and can do that in all kinds of weather. But our customers, they don't care about the out and back part, they care about the out part to get that delivery and doing that in all conditions, regardless of the terrain and mountain ranges.

We may have to fly through to get that delivery made.

Sade Agard: Thank you. And just to tell us a little bit more about. Is it platform two?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. So platform two is in the works at Zipline. This is really exciting. So as you can imagine with platform one with its cake box, a little paper parachute on it that floats to the ground, that takes a little bit of space to deliver into, right?

[00:04:00] So we're talking about requiring a few parking spots worth of space in order to deliver. Which also, which works very well in, in areas outside of metro areas, you tend to. outside of a metro, you tend to have that much room to deliver into. But our customers have been asking for us for years to deliver to to all homes and in metro areas.

And for many years we said, no, we can't do that. No, we don't do that. That's not what we do. But of course when your customers ask you for the same thing enough times, you need to go to the drawing board and figure out if you can achieve that for them. And that's what platform two is. So platform two is a system that delivers precisely enough, basically into a very small space.

You only need about a meter of space to deliver into. And to picture platform to picture a drone when it comes to deliver that comes and hovers about 100 meters up. So way up in the sky, you barely notice it. You definitely don't even hear it when it's hovering while it's delivering and platform to as a two part architecture.

[00:05:00] While the drone is hovering at a hundred meters up, it lowers down this thing we call the droid. The droid is what has your your package that we're delivering in it. And it's lowered down on a tether on a line. And that droid doesn't just have your package. It also has built in its own fans an autopilot.

So it can navigate very precisely into a very small space even in windy conditions and things like that place the package. And then within seconds, it's out of there. And so that's platform two. We're really excited about it cause it's, it enables this delivery. It enables delivery to the people who've been asking for it from zip line and it does in a way that we're really excited about just from creating the future we want to live in.

It's nearly silent. You won't hear it. It doesn't sound at all like that. We all picture drones sounding swarms of insects. It doesn't sound like that at all. It sounds like a wishing breeze if you're going to hear it. And and, yeah, and it's a and both of these things are both the drone that stays up high and the joy that comes to the ground.

They do this [00:06:00] entirely autonomously. And we're very excited about that. And it's coming later this year where we're in the testing phase right now that system.

Sade Agard: Thank you. So could you let us know where you fly your drones and probably best to talk more about like country wise, where are these where are your systems being set up?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. We're in a handful of countries in Africa we're here, we're in Japan and here in the US we're also in Europe and coming soon to the National Health Service which we're very excited about. UK.

Sade Agard: Thank you. Just to get an idea of what you're mainly delivering. So it seems like you're fairly involved in delivering healthcare supplies.

Could you elaborate more on that? On what exactly you're delivering?

Keenan Wyrobek: Absolutely. I think of what we deliver in three pillars and where we started. is in healthcare. And that's been our core pillar and always will be. And so this is everything from blood to hospitals, [00:07:00] vaccine delivery PPE to saline bags and various infusion products all the way through to pharmaceuticals and home delivery in the health space.

Yeah. And then since then we've expanded into other use cases. goods delivery, everything from animal health care products to retail products. And then the third pillar is hot meal delivery. And I like to say hot meal delivery because we are, we fly fast and we're not affected by traffic.

So when we deliver a meal, it is still hot when you get it, which is something that that the people appreciate when getting a meal delivered.

Sade Agard: Yeah. Thank you. So in terms of the size of these packages and how heavy they are, what are the drones able to basically accommodate?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah.

So it's a few kilos. Right now it's on the order of two and soon we're growing that to a little over three. Kilos.

Sade Agard: Thank you. So just to ensure that your drones are, flying safely and reliably how do they navigate through the skies? Do you have some kind of air traffic [00:08:00] control or, to ensure that they go in the right direction and they're not crashing into things?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. Great question. And even taking a step back on that question, cause safety is core to everything we do here at Zipline and having just achieved a million deliveries, it's something that we take very seriously. we both celebrate and take really seriously is our safety track record, which is that nobody's gotten hurt by our drones.

And that's the result of a lot of hard work from a lot of engineering teams and our operations teams to basically do everything with a level of rigor. That we think is required to do this responsibly. From an airspace integration point of view, basically how do there's a whole bunch of technologies that add up to navigating the airspace and be able to fly safely.

One of there's a really exciting one that got approved by the FAA, our Civil Aviation Authority here in the United States last year, which is really a Holy Grail kind of thing. moment or achievement for this industry. And to understand that, in many countries around the world, the love to [00:09:00] their space does not have where we fly with drones near the ground does not have a requirement for transponder.

So a transponder is a radio on an airplane that transmits its location to surrounding aircraft. And so here in the United States, we about a third of the aircraft we encounter. And when we're flying, do not have a transponder. And what that means is you have to have a sensor or some ability to sense with a sensor those aircraft where they are.

to maintain separation from those aircraft with human in them, obviously important for safe integration in the airspace. And this has been something that has been talked about for many decades now, but it turns out it's very hard to achieve. And actually when we set out to achieve it, we started where everybody else thought you should start, which is, Oh, maybe cameras or maybe radar.

And it turns out cameras just fundamentally don't see far enough reliably. To maintain the level of separation, the amount of separation that the regulators want to see and radar just by the time you can see far enough in all directions all around [00:10:00] you, your radar system weighs much more than the whole drone system way.

So you just can't physically get it off the ground on your drones. And that's when we went back to the drawing board and came up with the approach that we just got certified last year. Which which is this acoustic detect and avoid. So this is literally an array of microphones on the aircraft that listens for other aircraft to maintain separation.

I think of it very similarly to how, as we go for a walk outsider, we don't see an airplane first, we hear it first. And that's the same thing our aircraft do to maintain separation from other aircraft.

Sade Agard: Thank you. And just to get an idea of some engineering challenges maybe we can maybe look back a little bit more in the drones, like when you first started to test them.

So has a drone ever been stuck somewhere high or, how was that reclaimed or can you recall a time where you had to do a bit more work because it just wasn't working out with the drones, maybe like coming back to [00:11:00] station?

Keenan Wyrobek: Sure. The. There's, I'd say the biggest challenge we had going back into the early days is really around weather.

Our, medical emergencies just don't wait for the weather to clear and are the hospitals and clinics we serve day in and day out. They need us to deliver all the time. And actually, we see an increased demand for deliveries when the weather gets bad. And being really robust to weather has been one of the biggest engineering challenges that we've worked on, and we've tackled it from many point, many different angles in order to achieve what we've achieved.

So a few examples of what I mean are, What does it take to design the aircraft to just be robust to really crazy weather? Imagine flying through a Thunderhead. We do this all the time and then what the kind of climb rates you need and the amount of power that aircraft has to have in order for that to, for the aircraft to handle that and get through that.

We learned a lot about the aircraft design side to fly through those conditions. Another example of how we've tackled weather. Is [00:12:00] it from a completely different angle to compliment the aircraft design is an AI based weather forecasting. So we have our own weather forecasting this forecast, the very specific weather conditions that our aircraft can't handle, which are.

well, basically the moment of a formation of a thunderhead. So when a thunderhead is forming the massive updrafts and down drafts in those first few minutes of formation is it can create wins that our aircraft cannot handle. And so we built a forecasting A. I. Based forecasting tool specifically to forecast is very specific thing that we care a lot about to avoid them.

And I will say uh, addition in addition to other engineering projects like that, that have all in it improved our ability to handle and fly through heavier and heavier weather. The aircraft also has a parachute on the aircraft itself. So we talked about the package having a parachute, but the aircraft also has a whole airframe parachute.

So a large parachute that it can deploy if it needs to. The aircraft has [00:13:00] redundancy for, sensors have issues. We can keep flying or propeller has an issue. We can keep flying. But in the worst case, if we get into our, especially in a weather conditions, if we get into really extreme weather conditions that we almost never get into the aircraft can land itself by parachute.

And yeah, we send, we have a team that will hop in a truck and go retrieve that, that aircraft immediately out of the tree or whatnot that it needs to.

Sade Agard: Thank you. So it must be quite a sight seeing like all these drones being sent out, do you call it like a station or was it like a deployment center?

I'm not sure what you would call it.

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah, a distribution center as we call it. So it's where we hold all the inventory and where the drones take off from.

Sade Agard: Yeah. And I saw a video somewhere where when it's on its way back to the distribution center, it's hooked or. I don't know. It attaches to almost like a fishing rod style system.

Could you explain that a little bit more, please?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. So even like maybe to start with the why [00:14:00] here that we knew from all of our early work with the customers that they cared about really two things in the system. the range we could achieve. And, a low cost point we could achieve. That was those two things.

We're gonna make this practical for our customers. These health systems to use at scale. And the old the best way by like 800 percent over like a traditional drone to achieve range at low cost is with the aircraft with a fixed wing aircraft that flies on its wing. But of course, once you do that, now you have the big challenge of how do you take off and land?

And landing in stormy conditions with a traditional aircraft is that, it's very difficult to do reliably. And if you don't do that reliably, That kind of that can be the thing that drives the life of your aircraft and the reliability of your aircraft. Like basically hard landings.

You can imagine right that those hard landings and damage aircraft. And and so we said that we spent years trying to figure out how to reliably gently. lander aircraft, even in stormy conditions. And that's where this this [00:15:00] crazy contraption you're referring to came from. And the best way to describe it is like an inverted aircraft carrier.

So the way it works is our drone, it does a fly by, it doesn't touch down like an aircraft carrier. It just does a fly by, about six meters or so off the ground. And then we have between two poles is a line and those poles are motorized and about a pivot point that can swing that line up and down.

And basically what that system is doing is it swings that line up into that tail hook. And if it can catch the plane, which then it, then that plane gets decelerated and just hangs on the line and our operator removes it. And if it doesn't catch it, the drone will automatically go around and try again.

And this has proved very successful now with over a million deliveries at achieving that, that really hard thing of how do you gently, reliably and gently every time land an aircraft, even in very stormy conditions. And yeah, that's the crazy system that started. If you've seen some videos online if you dig around, you can see the original prototype of this was made with [00:16:00] actual fishing poles.

The production version has come a little ways since then, but it's it was quite an adventure figuring that out.

Sade Agard: Thank you. So I know you've done quite a lot of work in Rwanda. Could you just give us maybe one or two case studies on how your work has been delivering healthcare there? I know that we've already touched upon what kind of, items you are delivering, but how's it really going in Rwanda?

Cause it seems like you're making such a big impact there in particular.

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah, there's a lot of countries, Rwanda is the first country we took to national scale. Which was, what's a really exciting milestone. And now we have a handful of additional countries at national scale as well, which is really exciting.

In terms of use cases, the use case I'm most excited about in Rwanda is our impact on maternal mortality. So maternal mortality is basically how often does a mother die in childbirth? The very first thing we ever started delivering in Rwanda, and we still, of course, deliver to this day is blood.

Now, blood is. We think of blood as [00:17:00] free, right? Cause it's donated, but in reality, blood is very expensive. The cost of collecting the blood, testing it, typing the blood, separating the blood into different blood products, right? Red blood cells versus plasma platelets, and then transporting that blood out to all the places that might need it is the cost of that.

It's very expensive. And the shelf life of blood is very short. The shortest shelf life of the, of is of the different blood products is seven days. So right from seven days from the time it's donated to the time it needs to be used or has to be discarded. And that makes blood very precious, right?

Every country has this problem. There's no country in the world that has as much blood in their blood. supply is they'd like. And and so what we do in Rwanda is rather than having to guess what blood might be needed where and send it proactively out to these hospitals and clinics. We're able to hold most of that blood in one central location and send it out when we know it's needed.

So given hospital or clinic and put in a request, I need this much blood of this type right now, and we get it out to [00:18:00] them. And a recent independent study came out on this. Is this really exciting? Oh, I should mention one other detail. The biggest use of blood around the world is in childbirth. It is from, it is helping mothers who are bleeding in childbirth.

And and yeah, so there's recent independent study came out that looked at hospitals. We serve and don't serve in Rwanda and elsewhere and found that The hospitals we serve in Rwanda were able to reduce their maternal mortality rates by over 50%. And that is, I'll be honest, I'll be pretty, it's pretty mind blowing to me.

And it's a testament to how much impact this very unglamorous thing of Logistics can have of, in the healthcare space of getting these doctors what they need when they need it to treat their patients.

Sade Agard: Yeah. Thank you so much. Just to go back a little bit to traditional delivery methods.

So I'm thinking like, cars and motorcycles could you just give us, some of the main benefits of using drones instead [00:19:00] of these delivery methods? What current delivery issues are your drones dealing with? So solving, because obviously we've just spoken about your work in Rwanda and how they're able to get blood quite efficiently.

Could you just talk us through the main points that, yeah, the drones are solving, please.

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. So probably the most obvious one is really around. Both speed and on time, right? So we can, because we fly straight and you can't really drive straight to your destination, you got to follow the roads.

And because we fly incredibly fast, we're not only get, we only make deliveries much faster than you can using roads, but we do it reliably on time because we literally, just fly over any traffic. And those by itself make a huge impact in terms of, on demand delivery is only powerful if it's actually on demand and predictable.

And but there's other benefits that are really exciting as well. The one I'm most excited about is around the environmental impact, right? In some ways, if the thought experiment we like to think about [00:20:00] is imagine you're an alien looking down on planet earth and Humans jumping into 3, 000 pound, vehicles with one little baggie of something like food or a meal or something and driving it to somebody and handing it to them.

It's, it's objectively ridiculous. And when you look at the environmental impact of that method of delivery versus drones, it is startling. We're talking about a massive reduction in environmental impact for every every road based delivery we can displace on that environmental impact is to be clear, we're not just talking about, oh, we're electric versus which we are, which our drones are versus someone in the gas car.

The environmental impact benefit displacing an electric vehicle, making a delivery on the roads is also. Just incredibly massive. And this is, we're geeks on this and this is not just looking at some simple thing of okay, we use less, electricity in our batteries on a given flight.

This is looking at the full impact of our supply chain. And there's just not many [00:21:00] opportunities out there to have this big of an environmental impact with a single project. And so that's really exciting as well. And that's of course, in addition to all the other benefits of just fewer cars in the roads, less traffic overall.

These are, of course, are the goals of many cities and countries around the world. Yeah there's so many wins.

Sade Agard: Thank you. So would you say that, there are some other benefits as well for the local communities that you're serving in, are you like providing jobs as well? Are they working in distribution centers with you?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yo, absolutely. I think there's two ways of looking at this. One is the, all of our operations, including our leadership in every country we operate in is entirely led and staffed by local community members. And that's really important to create a phenomenal service. I think the even more exciting environment, sorry, the more exciting economic impact of of this is, We basically create this portal, right?

We enable anybody, a local pharmacist, your favorite restaurant, whatever it might be to have this magical portal [00:22:00] in their wall that enables them to very easily and very seamlessly provide on demand deliveries to their local community. And that creates an X factor on their productivity. That is really exciting.

And not just on their, That's, of course, half the value. The other half the value is the benefit to the community itself of now having access, to that thing that that just improves the quality of their life, the productivity of their work whatever it might be.

Sade Agard: Thank you. Yeah, so my question's almost finished.

So I'm just wondering, what are you planning to do with your drones next? So we've mentioned the NHS in your work there. What can we expect? That to be tested. And at what scale are you looking to do that on?

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. So we're excited to be launching with NHS later this year. And the initial scale we would refer to as a pilot scale compared to the national scale deployments we have around the world.

And we're excited to we have a perfect track record of working with public health systems around the world and starting with a pilot scale and showing that [00:23:00] benefit and very quickly scaling up from there. And I think that's testament to, I think we've all experienced this with other forms of on demand delivery, right?

Meal delivery where. It's one of those things where once you have it, all of a sudden you realize how transformative it can be for, for your life. And this is just as true for health systems. As soon as, once they experienced the power of not having to forecast, not having waste, inventory expire on the shelf, not having, basically in a positive sense, having all of their their health practitioners, whether they're in someone's home.

Or in a health clinic have what they need to do their job right when they need it is so powerful both for improving the economics of the health system and of course, for improving the health outcomes for the health system that that our challenge to is, we are lucky to have the challenge of how fast can we scale up for those customers once we launched.

Sade Agard: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And just to get an idea of how. Your clients can basically adapt take on this system. Is it quite easy to just retrofit, these drones [00:24:00] into current systems? How are they able to, add this to their current. I don't know.

Systems.

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Good. Great question. So with platform one, your customers will set up a distribution center and then the health partners and other partners will basically replicate their inventory at our distribution center. And we fulfill from there. It's basically very seamless, like working with any sort of three P.

L. Warehouse provider or delivery services provider with platform two. It's even easier. Platform two. is designed from the ground up to bolt onto our customers existing facilities. So where they have whether it's a pharmacy or whatever it might be, they literally bolted on to the outside and and they basically just start making deliveries using our network and we operate the network for them.

So they don't have to worry about drones. They have to worry about any of that the operational challenge of being a An airline and all that, that, that fun stuff that we take care of. They just get this magical portal with the droid. They open the droid, they throw in the, whatever they want to deliver, close that droid.

And then that moments later is making [00:25:00] that delivery out to their The community member who placed the order.

Sade Agard: Thank you. Yeah. So was there anything else you wanted to add? Maybe I've missed something with my questions, but here's the opportunity for you to let our audience know of anything else you'd like them to learn about, zipline.

Keenan Wyrobek: Yeah. I, for me, the. What's exciting about drone delivery, right? So you have to live in certain places in the world today to really, experience it day in and day out. And there's a few things about it. I think you're very counterintuitive. One is you don't notice it, right? The drones are essentially silent, just like a bird flying overhead.

You wouldn't notice, you don't notice the drones flying overhead. But even more importantly than this, it takes about three days for a community we serve to go from really excited about drone delivery to thinking this is entirely boring. And I think that's great. And what I mean by that is, just like tap, water coming out of your faucet.

It's something we don't think about at all. We take it for granted. It's just boring. That is the sign of really great [00:26:00] infrastructure. And once something like this becomes infrastructure in an air, in a community it just trans, it starts to transform everything just like running water tit.

And I'm really excited about what that means. It's both a strong signal to us and gives us conviction. That this is something that's going to be ubiquitous around the world. And it's something that, that really speaks to well, just how easy it is to integrate it and get used to it and use it in your day to day life and your day to day work.

And that's really exciting because I think that's, the promise of drone delivery is very user centered in that way, in a very boring way, as in a way you just count on it and don't think about.

Sade Agard: And that wraps up this episode of Lexicon. Thank you all for tuning in and a big thank you to Keenan for being our guest today. Follow Zipline on flyzipline. com and stay updated on their drone journeys via [00:27:00] Instagram, LinkedIn and X. For the latest in engineering and technology, Keep tabs on our social media channels too.

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