Online orders placed by clients will soon go aerial in Rwanda, thanks to a new service launched by Zipline, an American company that designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones. ALSO READ: Rwanda deploys drones to deliver diabetes meds at patients’ doorsteps The new service seeks to provide quiet, fast and precise autonomous delivery directly to homes in cities and suburbs. “The company’s next generation home delivery platform is practically silent (designed to sound like wind rustling leaves), and is expected to deliver up to 7 times as fast as traditional automobile delivery, completing 10-mile deliveries in about 10 minutes,” read a statement from Zipline. ALSO READ: Rwanda, Zipline ink $61 million deal to scale operations Rwanda is expected to be Zipline’s first customer for the service, which it will use to enable urban aerial last-mile delivery to homes, hotels and health facilities in Kigali and elsewhere in the country. Prior to this, Zipline has been partnering with the ministry of health to deliver blood for transfusion in remotely located health facilities, and recently trials were conducted for delivering insulins to homes of diabetes patients in remote areas. ALSO READ: Inside Zipline’s new distribution centre Zipline’s drones fly more than 300 feet above the ground and are nearly inaudible. When they arrive at their destinations, they hover safely and quietly at that altitude, while they steer to the correct location, and gently drop off the packages. Several businesses across the healthcare and restaurant sectors have already signed on to use Zipline’s new home delivery service, the company said in a statement. “The future of delivery is faster, more sustainable and creates broader access, all of which provides improved value for our customers,” said Jonathan Neman, Co-Founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, a company that is partnering with Zipline to further its mission of connecting people to food in the US. Zipline said its end-to-end solution seamlessly integrates with a business’s current operations. That includes its dual-use docking and charging hardware, software that easily works with third-party inventory management and ordering systems, an intuitive app that allows order tracking down to the second, and an autonomy system that has already guided the flight paths of 40 million commercial miles. “Zipline designed its docking and charging hardware to have a light footprint that can be attached to any building or set up as a freestanding structure. A Zip (drone) can be easily loaded by a business’ employee who can send off orders in seconds, right from their location, without even having to leave the kitchen, pharmacy or doctors’ office,” reads a statement from Zipline. When the solution starts to work, customers can make on-demand orders, or schedule the exact time they’d like their package to arrive, down to the second. “Over the last decade, global demand for instant delivery has skyrocketed, but the technology we’re using to deliver is 100 years old. We’re still using the same 3,000-pound, gas combustion vehicles, driven by humans, to make billions of deliveries that usually weigh less than 5 pounds. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and it’s terrible for the planet,” said Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline. He added that: “Our new service is changing that and will finally make deliveries work for you and around your schedule. We have built the closest thing to teleportation ever created - a smooth, ultrafast, convenient, and truly magical autonomous logistics system that serves all people equally, wherever they are.”
