Amazing Invention- This Drone Will Change Everything

- I cut my finger making lunch, so I placed an order for some band-aids a couple minutes ago, and now they're four seconds away. (drone whirs) (bag plops on deck) That is a nearly silent drone system that can deliver a package from the sky right to my backyard in as little as two minutes with dinner plate accuracy. And as far as I am concerned, that's basically teleportation.

This is the very near future of package delivery from a company called Zipline. It's been over a decade since we were first promised drone delivery that looked like this. And to be honest, I was never that stoked about it, because I couldn't imagine that anyone would actually want something that big and loud with dangerously fast spinning propellers landing anywhere near their house.

And that was a bummer, 'cause with the explosion of people using Amazon or food delivery apps like DoorDash or Instacart, billions of doorstep deliveries are now happening every year. But when your lunch only weighs a few ounces driving it to everyone with these two-ton, gas-powered vehicles is wildly inefficient, bad for the whole planet, and not to mention just really slow. Drne delivery would not only take a lot of cars off the road, but it would be a lot faster than a car, it would be fully electric, fully autonomous, and it would cost pennies worth of energy per delivery.

And with Zipline, because the droid that lowers the package can move laterally in any direction, it could make a dartboard-sized precision landing even in high winds, while the main drone can stay 400 feet up in the sky, making the whole thing whisper quiet. (drone makes high pitched whistle) That is very quiet. Also due in part to the clever design of these really funky propellers.

As you all know, I only make about 10 videos a year. And while most are just sort of ridiculous- (cannon explodes) - [Offscreen Speaker] What? !

(devices explode) (horn beeps) (person screams) (foam bullet whizzes) (bell dings) I like to dedicate one video to showcase how clever people are using engineering to change the world for the better. And to be clear, the company I'm talking about today is not sponsoring this or paying me in any way. I'm just really impressed by the work that they're doing and how they're doing it.

So we'll circle back in a minute to exactly how they're gonna pull off deliveries using these short-range drones in a city. But it begs the question, if they can make it work there, why not use gliding drones to cover longer distances to deliver critical medical supplies for countries with lots of remote villages? Well, as it turns out, catapulting life-saving blood through the skies is what they've already been doing for over six years, which is why we need to head out to Rwanda to understand where this all started.

And immediately after showing up, we were right in the thick of it as drones were taking off- Wow! (laughing) And landing- That was another one land! Every 90 seconds.

They're coming from everywhere. And as a newcomer, it felt a bit chaotic. But if you're gonna rack up 40 million miles worth of drone flights, (launcher zings) your team needs to be operating with the efficiency of an F1 pit crew.

So here's a crash course on how it all works. It all starts with an order coming in from a doctor at a hospital, say for example, for an emergency supply of blood. Then once it's all packed up, it gets passed out to be placed in the belly of the drone, and then the whole thing is placed on the launcher.

At that point, they attach the wings and secure the battery, followed by the nose cone. Then after some pre-flight safety checks, they launch the drone (launcher zings), all within 90 seconds of the order coming in. The catapult launcher takes the drone from zero to 65 miles an hour in a third of a second which is literally less time than it takes you to blink.

And it's a pretty clever design, too, because it means the drone immediately starts at its cruising speed, where it takes much less energy to stay airborne. Then once it's in the air cruising at 70 miles per hour, it navigates its way to the hospital, and upon arriving, opens the trap door to drop the package, which lands safely using a parachute. Having now completed the mission it continues making all its own decisions to autonomously navigate back home from as far away as 150 miles round trip.

Then taking inspiration from an aircraft carrier, as the drone approaches, the military-grade GPS broadcasts its position within one centimeter. So these two poles know exactly when to swing up at the last possible moment, snagging a hook on the tail with the cable, which safely slows it down. Then once it's settled to a stop, the crew comes in to remove the battery and wings, and it all goes back into rotation.

The whole thing is really impressive and incredibly robust, which means it works in pretty much any weather. And because there's no human steering it, it has no issues flying at night. So they run the operation 24 hours a day, which is how in six years, they've managed to make those half a million, often lifesaving deliveries.

That is the uppermost top of the iceberg tip of how they're doing what they're doing. But what you should know is six years ago all the experts told them this was a hopeless cause and failure was a near certainty, and they kind of weren't wrong. - Building an engineering product take time.

So you prototype, you know, you build it, and then you fail, and then you try it again, and you fail, and you try it again, until you have this shiny product that you want. This is a different type of aircraft. This is not what we had.

The first one used to land on these inflated mattresses. The vehicle had a hook on the back. - [Mark] Yeah.

- By the tail. - Yeah. - [Engineer] The tail would deploy like an aircraft carrier.

- [Mark] Yeah. - [Engineer] And then the fishing pole would pull it, and it would land on the mattress. - [Mark] First of all, he's not saying that figuratively.

They were scrappy in the early days, using actual fishing poles, as you could see here. And secondly, this is Abdul. And what you should know about Abdul is he grew up in Rwanda, not far from where these drones are launching.

And while he would eventually go on to do graduate work in robotics, attending both Stanford and Harvard, he got his start in engineering from much more simple means. - I remember that I would make cars from milk boxes that, you know, was leftover. You know, we would add tires then and use it as a car.

- Abdul was orphaned as a child when he lost both of his parents and all three of his siblings in the Rwandan genocide, narrowly escaping himself. But he didn't give up on his passion for engineering. And so as he got older, he would go around to all the local hospitals, fixing their MRI machines for free, using knowledge he gained from watching YouTube videos.

Abdul's the very first Zipline employee in Rwanda, and he really helped to pioneer so many of the systems they have in place today that are now used all over the world. And so in an effort to test those very systems, I wanted to see if it was robust enough that even a total newb like me could send out an order. Oh, we got one.

Panic! - (laughs) Don't worry. - Don't worry?

Okay. Gloves, okay? (blows air into glove) Good enough.

(snaps glove) This is where the blood is, right? - O positive. - It's O positive.

- [Worker] Yeah. - I feel like I shouldn't be touching this. Stay calm.

That's the number one rule. - Now you scan it. - Scan it?

(scanner beeps) - Do six wraps. - Like this? - Two, three, four- - Five, okay.

(rips paper and grunts) (label snaps in the air) (Worker chuckles) Just out here saving lives. And once I ring the bell, (bell dings) it's the drone team's problem. Okay, what do I do?

- Check if there's no tangles. - [Mark] And push it here? Out of my way.

I'm comin' through! The wings. How's that?

Battery? Which one do we pick? There's so many!

So after a final check of the drone's condition little bit of look to the right and cough. (instruments beep) (propellers whir) (launcher zings) We had lift off. Yeehah!

I'm a hero. We did it. I just like saved life basically.

Wow! How do you guys do this all day long? So now that I had a pretty good feel for the launch site, we headed out to see where some of these drones were actually flying to.

So we left the launch site like three and a half hours ago. We're driving to this remote hospital on these really windy roads. And as we've been driving, we've been tracking and seeing some of these Zipline drones delivering blood and medical supplies to this hospital.

So since we're about a half hour out I thought it would be fun to place my own emergency order. Then it could meet us when we get there. 'Cause when you need extra ointment, you just need extra ointment.

And sure enough, a few minutes after arriving I got a notification for an incoming package. This is wild, because we're like four hours away on some really windy roads. I got it!

(laughs) Close. So close. - And so after opening the package and checking their handiwork, I asked if I could speak to a few of the doctors.

When's the last time you delivered a baby - In few minutes ago. - A few minutes ago? (laughing) That's pretty fresh.

- For the doctors, it was like a miracle. - With Zipline, we are sure that in 15 to 20 minutes, we're going to get what we need. And you are sure that patient will be saved.

- But it wasn't just the doctors who were big on Zipline. I also spoke with a handful of patients who for various different reasons are all alive today because of a Zipline delivery. (speaking foreign language) - [Translator] Every time when I see the drones around I just think that someone's life is going to be saved.

- And that's kind of true, 'cause their drones have reduced in-hospital maternal mortality by 88%. Zipline has two launch sites that give them coverage for pretty much anywhere in Rwanda, but they also have operations running in all of these countries. And while they serve 3000 hospitals globally today, that number will be 10,000 by the end of the the year.

All right, so we've covered their long range country delivery drones, which means we've now got the context to talk about their short range city delivery drones. But first I just have to interject here and say I was blown away by Rwanda as a country. I mean right outta the gate, their stoplights are really cool because they're just countdowns till the light turns green.

They can balance and carry pretty much anything on their heads, and there's motorcycle taxis everywhere. And given that when in Rwanda, you do as the Rwandans do whenever possible, that's how we got around ourselves. What a freakin' boost!

Everyone was also super friendly everywhere we went. Well, not everyone, because if you stop to play soccer with some random kids- Am I good, am I good? Just know they're not gonna take it easy on you.

(kids laugh) Besides the fact that Messi seems to like it, before traveling there, the only real thing I knew about Rwanda was the Rwandan genocide that took place about 30 years ago. And while there are still plenty of battle scars, as horrific as that was, it sort of galvanized the country into a period of healing and solidarity as a single Rwandan people, instead of divisive ethnic groups. For example, on the last Saturday of the month, literally everyone spends the day picking up trash and volunteering in their local communities.

And that's one of the reasons you hardly see litter anywhere. The other one being 15 years ago, they were one of the first countries to ban all single-use plastics. There was just a pervasive optimism in the air.

Everyone was moving with the purpose everywhere we went, not just working hard but working smart with their resources on hand. Yeah, buddy! Including their improvised soccer balls.

For over a decade attending school up to age 16 has been both mandatory and free. And when you combine that with leapfrogging to new technologies like drone delivery, for the last decade their economy has been growing at four times the rate of the US economy, while their violent crime rate has been 15 times less than the US. And finally the most awe-inducing part of the whole trip was when I hiked to see an entire family of mountain gorillas up close in the wild, which was equal parts adorable and terrifying.

I think he's looking at me. Mountain gorillas only exist in these two tiny red regions, and while there's only a thousand left in the world I got to just chill with 20 of 'em. They're critically endangered.

But thanks to Rwandan conservation efforts, funded by people paying for brief visits like this, their numbers have climbed by 200 over the past decade. All that's to say that besides of course, my own country, Rwanda is my new second-favorite country. We got this.

And next time I go back, I'm bringing a bunch of soccer balls- Oh yeah! Which I will give away to any kid who just promises not to embarrass me. (animated firebomb explodes) Okay, so now let's talk a little bit more about these new short-range city drones.

Because for the 4 billion doorstep deliveries that will happen this year in the US, and that number doesn't even include Amazon, by the way, Why not at least try and take some of those slow-moving-traffic-causing, two-ton-gas-guzzling cars off the road, in exchange for a much faster delivery that's also electric, autonomous, really quiet, and zero emissions. And while the solution of dropping down a droid that could perfectly control its landing from super high up seemed promising and way better than something like this that had been proposed before, when they first told me about it, I had two main questions. One, how loud and disruptive are they?

Because the last thing we want are annoying drones buzzing by our rooftops all day. And two, how safe are they? Because the other last thing we want is for those same annoying drones to start falling down on us from the sky.

I also had a bonus third question around how a business is even supposed to load in their items for delivery. And so in a search for answers, I went right to their headquarters not that far down the road from where I live. And the first thing you notice in the lobby is this really cool projection that not only shows the total number of flights they've flown, now at over half million, but it also shows all the long-range drones they have in the air at that exact moment, delivering those critical medical supplies all around the world.

And this isn't now just where they design and build all their drones. It's also where they do a lot of their testing. And they test pretty much everything in every way possible before getting it out to the field as quickly as possible.

And according to their CEO, Keller, this is something they discovered early on. - Our key insight was we were dumb, and we basically always assumed we were dumb. And for that reason, when we designed things, we got them into the real world super fast.

- [Mark] Yeah. - [Keller] And learned by serving real people. - [Mark] Yeah.

- And you learn so much that you can't learn in a lab or in an ivory tower. - And so before we actually hear just how quiet these things are, I just wanna echo that all the best engineers I've ever known have had that same level of humility, knowing there's no better way to learn than to test and to break stuff. That's why I named the toy company I started that has the express goal of teaching kids to think like engineers, CrunchLabs.

It's because things are supposed to crunch and to break and to fail along the way. And so if I could get them to do more than just passively watch a video by building something alongside me while we talk about the physics of what's going on, then I know the principles will really sink in. - Yes.

- So if you wanna have a ton of fun while building up that resiliency in your brain like a muscle- - That works! - [Mark] Just head to CrunchLabs. com or use the link in the video description.

All right, so to answer my first question on the noise level, I'll just show you my actual reaction to the first time I heard it. I mean, I hear something. But I cannot believe that's airborne!

Are you serious? And I just wish there was a better way to convey this on video, but here's my best attempt. You'll first hear a leaf blower, then a typical hobby drone that weighs one pound, then their drone that weighs 50 pounds.

And of course, I've kept the audio levels completely untouched for all three. (leaf blower hums) (drone whirs) (drone lightly whistles) That is whisper quiet. That is very quiet.

(cow moos) That cow is way louder (laughing) than that drone. I bet the mic picked up that cow. And this test was incredibly surprising to me, because I sort of just assumed the weight of a thing would exactly determine how loud the propellers will end up being to keep that thing in the air.

But it turns out that's not actually true, even if you just look at nature. Pigeons, for example, sound like this. (pigeon flaps) But with owls, there's an evolutionary pressure to be as quiet as possible.

And as a result, their flight sounds like this. For this reason, to crack the code, Zipline actually did turn to nature. - We studied the hummingbird a lot where you have- - Oh sure.

- They have the worst case. They're tiny, and they're really quiet. They just like hover there.

You barely hear them. - By the way, that's Keenan. He's another Zipline co-founder.

And for your robotics nerds, he's the dude who invented ROS, which is the open source software used by basically anyone who wants to build anything robotic. So in effort to try and visualize the secret of their quiet propellers, in this graph, the area under the curve could represent the energy from one of those annoying high-pitched hobby drones, where the closeness of these spikes is the high frequency that's just sort of grating on your ears. So after studying the hummingbird and designing really wild-looking rotors like this, Zipline figured out how to take those spikes and flatten them all out.

So while the extra weight means there's still more energy, or area under the curve, getting rid of all the spikes, means it's much more of a constant whooshing sound. More like white noise that your brain just sort of doesn't register. They use the same quiet propeller approach for their long range drones, as you could tell from this doctor with an impeccable taste in YouTube content who just wanted to say hi.

You've seen my videos, now you get to be in one. (laughs) Have you seen the planes fly over and deliver the supplies here? - I have not yet seen one come and deposit something here.

- That's amazing. There was just 15 deliveries in the last hour - They're really quiet. If I would have heard it, I would have, you know, gone to see it.

- For my second question regarding safety. Just like when sending something to Mars, all their critical systems have backups on board. In engineering, we call this redundancy.

And they even demonstrated for us how if one propeller stops working, it could still fly, due in part to the large back propeller that picks up the slack. And that back propeller is pretty clever, by the way, because it's what propels the drone forward as it moves across town. But then it turns down 90 degrees to help steer and create extra lift while it's stationary and dropping down the droid.

In addition to the redundancy, a whole aircraft parachute is automatically deployed if there's a problem that's sensed, or if the drone just loses power altogether. And because of their painstaking engineering efforts it's worth noting, in the six years they've been operating for those half a million flights, they've had exactly zero incidents causing any injury. As for my third bonus question around how the drones get loaded up, in the most simple case, something like a grocery store could reserve some parking spots as a loading zone.

Or as one of the Zipline engineers told me- - You can take a window from your local pharmacy and turn it into this portal. - So the droid would come down the chute, then some ASAP items like these would get loaded inside, then it goes back up the chute, into the drone, and off for delivery. For healthcare, if you were really sick, and say, on a 15-minute video call with your doctor, by the time the call was ending, your medications could be on your back porch, so you don't have to leave your house.

You could also imagine how this could work with a distribution center or a large retail store. More than 90% of people in the US live within 10 miles of a large retail store, and Zipline drones conveniently can make a 10-mile round trip while carrying up to eight pounds. An additional win for the planet here is you don't need to use all the cardboard to box it up, because it doesn't have to survive being shipped out on a big truck.

But this isn't just for big stores. Your favorite local shop or restaurant can now more easily afford to send a thing to your door but at an ostensibly much lower cost than a person driving a 3000 pound car to drop it off. And as soon as by the end of this year, customers such as Sweetgreen will start delivering salads straight to your backyard.

And not having packages left on front porches is the worst news to hit the porch pirate community since the invention of the glitter bomb. - Aww, you (bleep). (device sprays) - Alright, all right, we (bleep) get it.

Okay. - All right. So if your mind isn't already blown let me try one final time by planting a seed for something we might see much further in the future.

And to be clear, this is not at all from Zipline. It's just an idea that won't leave my head after seeing all this. Because it stands to reason, if the system can work for packages, it should be able to work for humans, right?

In other words, imagine a bigger drone. Let's say it's an ambulance, with more powerful but equally quiet propellers, parked so high up in the sky, you can hardly see it. Then it lowers the entire cockpit like the droid, which could quietly touch down in your driveway.

So you hop in, or they put you in on the ground, then it reels you in, so you can glide above roads and traffic straight to your destination, only to be dropped off safely in the same manner. All right, so finally, I just wanna wrap up with the coolest part of all of this by far. The whole time we were there, kids would be lined up at the fence to watch the drones be launched and captured over and over.

In fact, one kid came up specifically wanting to show Abdul what he built completely on his own. And in that moment, it was impossible not to compare the complexity of this build to the simple milk carton version Abdul grew up making. Because here you have Abdul who bears a scar on his head from the same machete that killed his entire family as a child, not only using his engineering knowledge to save the lives of his people, but more importantly, to inspire the next generation of problem solvers to dream even bigger.

It's the type of thing that leaves you feeling a little bit of that contagious Rwandan optimism for the future and the incredible potential of us mere humans. In the future, your CrunchLabs box just might come from the sky. And the best part of Abdul's story is how using the superpower of engineering, they literally willed something into existence that is now saving lives.

(cable zips) (Mark hits the floor) And as it says on the box, my goal with CrunchLabs is to help you think like an engineer. That means you know how to think critically and break a problem down into manageable steps. Thinking like an engineer makes you a better soccer player or piano practicer or math studier, because you're resilient.

And just like Abdul, you know the importance of failing a bunch before you finally hit that breakthrough. (goo explodes) (kids yell) So the way it works is every month, a really fun toy comes in a box like this. And when you open it, there's a link to a video where you not only build it alongside me, but I teach you all the juicy physics principles behind how the toy works.

And the best part of all is each month, we randomly select one box to slip in a platinum ticket. And if it happens to be your box- - [Parent] Oh my gosh! You won, buddy!

- Oh my gosh! (kid whoops) - Then you're coming out right here to CrunchLabs to design with me and my team for a day. So if you wanna unlock the superpower of learning to create and build whatever you could dream up, use the link in the video description, or go to CrunchLabs.

com and order your Build Box subscription today. Thanks for watching.