![]() ![]() A drone delivery-especially in a place with bad roads or terrible traffic-might save it time and money. ![]() If the hospital doesn’t have the working machine for a day, it can lose tens of thousands of dollars. He cites the example of a specialized MRI machine part, which could be needed for a repair. “We’re not just trying to solve logistics costs, but other costs,” says Raptopoulos, the Matternet CEO, whose latest collaboration with UPS in Winston-Salem transports speciality medicines and PPE. It’s where the money is, and where drones’ speed can really count. That the first drone delivery experiments have focused on business-to-business deliveries in healthcare isn’t an accident. That suggests a longer timeline for everyday deliveries like toilet paper and socks. ![]() Or, as Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos puts it, with the tact of someone whose business model depends on still-in-development regulations, “not scalable.” In Switzerland, where Matternet has worked with the Swiss Post to complete over 3,000 flights transporting medical samples, drones are monitored remotely from an operations center near Zurich.Īustralians living near drones making deliveries compared the noise to an “F1 car a couple of blocks away,” or “the whine of a dentist's drill overhead.” And they must be observed during every moment of their journey by (appropriately named) visual observers stationed along the route, who must view the drones, without binoculars, to ensure that the things won’t crash into anything else in the sky.įor a cutting-edge tech, it’s pretty low-tech. The quadcopters must be operated by specialized drone pilots, who must pass a challenging aeronautical knowledge test to get their licenses. Think of it: little flying machines, zipping about at speeds up to 43 mph, bearing the goods to heal.Īt this point, though, the drone operations are a little, well, human. The companies’ aims are decidedly futuristic: to ferry specialty medicines and protective equipment between two of the system’s facilities, less than a half-mile apart. In mid-July, a UPS subsidiary called Flight Forward and the drone company Matternet started a project with the Wake Forest Baptist Health system in North Carolina. ![]()
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