US robotics startup to use drones to deliver blood and vaccines in Rwanda
09 May 2016
A US robotics startup is working on plans to use drones to deliver vaccines and blood for transfusions to hard-to-reach areas of Rwanda.
The startup, Zipline International and vaccine distribution organisation Gavi had received an $800,000 grant from shipping giant UPS to start the drone project in July.
With drones, ''it does not matter if there are washed out roads, washed out bridges, jungles or mountains in the way,'' Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told reporters on Thursday before demonstrating how the company's computer-controlled drones took off, dropped packages by parachute and returned.
While Amazon, Walmart and Google planned to use hovering quadcopter drones to deliver packages to customers, the two-year-old Zipline had built a fleet of fixed-wing, airplane-style drones capable of flying to remote locations in countries where motorcycle or truck deliveries could be difficult.
The Rwandan government which needs to make 150 deliveries per day of blood to transfusion facilities in the country is Zipline's first customer.
According to Rinaudo, he and his co-founders had intended to build ''cool consumer robots'', but a trip to a medical centre in Tanzania made them change course to serve a more humanitarian cause.
''In the same way that mobile phones were able to leapfrog the existence of landlines in these countries, we think that this technology can leapfrog the absence of roads,'' Rinaudo said. ''And if it's something that people are depending on (for) their lives, we need to get it there. And if we can do so cost-effectively, why on earth wouldn't we?''
The drones would deliver blood and vaccines to half the transfusion centres in the country of 11 million people, speeding up deliveries 20 times as compared with the land route.
Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is taking a step-by-step approach to drones, is expected to finalise rules for small drone use that will most likely limit their use to within the "visual line-of-sight" of an operator or observer.
