Co-founder @zipline, using fleets of robot airplanes to approximate teleportation
San Francisco
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1/ Today, Zipline unveiled our next generation delivery drone system, designed to provide the best home delivery service the planet has ever seen. It's so out-there that you probably won't believe your eyes... 🧵
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It's time...
Zipline's next big breakthrough is enabling anyone to send packages through the Zipline Network.
Introducing, the Zipping Point... 1/n
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The future is already here, if you know where to look. 24-hour timelapse of the world's largest autonomous drone delivery system, covering an entire country.
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Zipline just rolled out our April software release. Our team shipped 1,760 changes after testing for 3,256 flight hours (20,700 test flights) on 76 unique aircraft.
Here is a *long* thread diving deep into the top 20 changes... 1/many
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Zipline Patient Stories — Delivery #1,459,819
On the evening of March 28th at 17:00 GMT, a 4-year-old girl was playing outside her home in Gbintiri, a farming village in the north east region of Ghana, when she was bitten by a venomous snake hiding under a pile of firewood. Her parents, realizing the severity of the bite, rushed her to Gbintiri Health Center, the closest facility in the area.
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Most people are not ready for how soon robots will become prevalent in daily life, and how much cheaper they will be than legacy ways of doing things.
This week @zipline locked in the architecture of our mid-2025 aircraft updates.
I'm not allowed to show most of the details, but this aircraft will be significantly easier to mass-manufacture, more resilient to the most extreme conditions, more aerodynamic, and somehow even quieter than our already very quiet aircraft. It has a significantly cheaper bill of materials while also having a much longer lifespan.
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This little girl’s story is a powerful reminder that every second counts. Low latency, high bandwidth access to physical goods shouldn’t be a privilege. The Zipline Network is helping make this a reality.
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With no time to spare, the medical team placed an emergency order to Zipline, requesting snake antivenom from the nearest Zipline distribution center, 77 km away. Within five minutes, the Zipline fulfillment team picked, packed, preflighted, and launched a Zip carrying the antivenom into flight.
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This story is not a rare, one-off event. Over the last year, Zipline has made 3,556 emergency deliveries of snake antivenom. This use case is estimated to have saved 1,100 lives last year—patients who were in critical condition and otherwise too far from lifesaving antivenom.
Zipline Patient Stories — Delivery #1,459,819
On the evening of March 28th at 17:00 GMT, a 4-year-old girl was playing outside her home in Gbintiri, a farming village in the north east region of Ghana, when she was bitten by a venomous snake hiding under a pile of firewood. Her parents, realizing the severity of the bite, rushed her to Gbintiri Health Center, the closest facility in the area.
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5/ This breakthrough makes integrating Zipline into any business extremely simple—a lightweight Zipping Point requires no construction and no power. Packages are easily loaded in seconds. A Zip automatically flies over and scoops the package up to the sky. Flying at 72 miles per hour, the package then zips directly to the customer in minutes.
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7/7 Zipping Points are undergoing intensive flight testing now. Aiming to roll these out to the community this summer. Teleportation just became one step closer to reality.
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This @Zipline delivery just started a new religion amongst the cows.
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8/ And yes, this works even in gusting winds, pouring rain, day, night, fog, snow, etc. At Zipline, we're only interested in solving problems that work reliably in the real world
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This mom received flowers by Zipline delivery for Mother's Day. She didn't even know there was a drone attached, 300 feet up! Creating that moment of pure magic, a truly delightful drone delivery, is exactly what we've worked so hard to achieve.
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15/ We deserve a future with fewer cars on the road, fewer idling trucks, no guilt about the emissions and packaging waste from the things we get delivered. A future where what you need appears in minutes not days. A future where moving matter gets cheaper over time.
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4/ Today, we’re unveiling the Zipping Point, a curbside mailbox that makes sending goods easier than ever. Zipping Points can be placed on any sidewalk or against a building, enabling people and businesses to join the Zipline Network and provide the best delivery experience to any home within 10 miles of that point.
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Busy morning @zipline , making thousands of deliveries. Each aircraft in the zip hurricane represents a real zip in flight, somewhere in the world, right now.
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5/ First, the droid lets us keep the mamma drone far, far away, making for a dead silent delivery experience that you'll love and your neighbor won't ever know even happened. We call this "passing the neighbor test"
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Watch the full unveil for plenty more details on what, how, and why
piped.video/watch?v=wuGuNu9q…
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The next day, Zipline followed up. The nurse on duty reported with joy that the child was stable, responding well to the treatment, and expected to make a full recovery. The prompt delivery, they said, had made the critical difference between life and death.
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14/ Best of all, this new technology produces 34x less carbon than traditional cars, and nearly 9x less energy than driving an electric car
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9/ The other breakthrough innovation is how easy it is for anyone to teleport goods, using what we call the loading portal. A droid magically appears inside your back-of-house business. Simply open its lid and drop the goods in
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2/ We're building on top of the tens of millions of miles we've already flown - half a million fully autonomous commercial deliveries over the last 7 years in 8 countries
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Drone delivery that threads the needle:
1. dodge the string lights
2. swerve the pool
3. stick the landing
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3/ Last year, Zipline launched the biggest breakthrough since, well, the original Zip: a new Zip so precise that it delivers safely and silently to a doorstep, while floating 300 feet up.
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Cruising at over 100 km/h, the Zip approached the health center in under 30 minutes. Without slowing down, the Zip released the lifesaving vial in a box with a paper parachute. Health workers retrieved it immediately and administered it to the little girl.
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11/ Another key piece of this puzzle is the dock. We asked ourselves "how can we allow any business to become part of the Zipline drone delivery network?"
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6/ The delivery droid is silent and cute. It has a few small thrusters to fight the wind and steer to a target its perception system dynamically identifies
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Within the hour, the little girl began to show signs of recovery. Her swelling reduced and she gradually regained consciousness.
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It’s really hard to pay attention to meetings in this conference room with a view of our micro-delivery flight cycler just outside.
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Ideate ✔️
Design✔️
Build✔️
Fly✔️
Crash✔️
Fix✔️
Validate✔️
Pilot✔️
Ship 🎉
Scale ← now the hard part begins
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10/ The droid automatically retracts into the mamma drone and together they fly away
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4/ The first innovation is the delivery droid, enabling us to safely deliver into small, protected, (often cluttered!) environments. Let's dig into how this cute lil bot works...
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We have a small storm-chasing team to push our system to the limit. Here's flight in a thunderstorm downpour.
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I spent the last 15 months solving an all-white 1000-piece puzzle with @MarkRober using a custom-built robot, and beat the jigsaw world record holder in a head-to-head race
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12/ The dock is both a charger and where we temporarily land to scoop up orders. It is designed as a flexible mounting system to easily adapt to any business's footprint and volume needs. Small sites might have 2 docks. High-volume sites can have dozens for 1000+ deliveries a day
ALT Large dock installation
ALT Medium-sized installation
ALT Low volume site
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2/ Gale-force winds: unlocked. In strong winds, the aircraft now flies upwind to help tug the Zip upstream as it delivers.
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13/ With this new drone, droid, and dock system, metro areas can become drone networks, autonomously, silently, and damn-near invisibly transporting what you need, when you need it, instantly to your porch
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2/ Ten years ago, Zipline unveiled the biggest breakthrough in delivery since the car: small electric Zips that fly fast above the ground, directly to the recipient.
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6/ For over a decade, Zipline has been redefining logistics—flying over 100 million autonomous miles and completing more than 1.4 million commercial deliveries. With Zipping Points, the network will expand faster, bringing instant delivery to more people, businesses, and communities worldwide.
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3/ Back to the new thing - we started by asking ourselves how could you build a delivery network that's better in *every way* than the gas-guzzling, traffic-blocked, ever-more-expensive cars & roads system we're being let down by today
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1. it’s the first model that feels *smarter* than me. All prior models were clearly more *knowledgeable* than me, but this one has IQ.
2. o3 does not flap. All prior models quickly fold with “You’re right…” when questioned/challenged on something hard. Gullible! o3 is able to confidently and correctly say “no, you’re not understanding. Let me dumb it down for you” if I think it is wrong when it’s not.
Late night problem solving with o3 this week has been the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had. There is a being inside this one.
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Building robotic infrastructure is now legal in America
Most people have no idea that the @WhiteHouse recently published a groundbreaking Exec Order to massively accelerate manufacturing and scale of drones in the US. Here what's going to change 🧵
whitehouse.gov/presidential-…
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The health workers quickly assessed the girl’s condition and confirmed signs of envenoming: swelling and fading consciousness. They immediately checked their stockroom, only to discover they had run out of antivenom. The next referral hospital was over two hours away by rough road, but this little girl had 45 minutes before the venom would paralyze her heart.
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You're thinking about it all wrong. Yellow and Green are just two exits on the Highway of Color. "Tennis ball" is a mile marker somewhere between.
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3/ Rain: unlocked. We completed validating our hardware and fault detection systems to enable safe, high performance flight in a downpour.
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7/ Meanwhile, the drone is literally just a silent speck in the sky for the ~10 sec end-to-end delivery experience
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.@zipline took a big risk giving MKBHD – the tech reviewer famous for tanking 2 startups last year – full access to our product for 48 hours. But as he says: "bad reviews don't kill companies, bad products do".
Turns out, MKBHD is pretty psyched about what we've built!
Just dropped a big new video! First one where I look at what we thought the future would look like vs what we have today
First up: Drone deliveries
piped.video/88yQTzlmsiA
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4/ Heat: unlocked. P2 aircraft now deliver in heat up to 95°F. Actively validating deliveries up to 115°F for upcoming release.
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20/ This software release contains hundreds of other refinements that make the Zipline Network safer, reduce delays to deliveries, and enable Zipline to scale faster.
Time to start testing the next release branch…
/end
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6/ Increased max propulsion motor torque from 8 -> 9 Nm per motor. This enables better flight performance when one or two propulsion motors fail in high winds. Achieved by augmenting the motor estimator with real-time flux linkage estimation and adapting control to magnetization changes for higher torque, lower losses, and extra reluctance torque.
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The team at Zipline can cooook
The new Zipping Point went from idea-on-a-whiteboard to built-product working in flight test, in just 101 days.
It's time...
Zipline's next big breakthrough is enabling anyone to send packages through the Zipline Network.
Introducing, the Zipping Point... 1/n
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13/ “Chaos Monkey” unleashed at Zipline’s high volume test site. The Chaos Monkey automatically injects simulated faults into each test aircraft—such as failing a motor mid flight or knocking out GPS—to ensure our redundancy works at scale.
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We've been hard at work on a crazy new drone delivery system for 3 years now and can't wait to finally show it to the world tomorrow
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8/ In degraded conditions, a propulsion motor will no longer shut down upon overheating; instead, it will continue operating until mechanical failure occurs. Flight tests conducted under high-stress conditions have validated that motors reliably deliver full torque up to 575ºF.
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7/ Improved Zip-to-Zip deconfliction. Evasive maneuvers for “last second” deconfliction. Increased wireless transmit power by +5dB.
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At 3:18am, a Zipline drone made our 1 millionth delivery. It was one of more than a thousand autonomous deliveries we made in the last 24 hours and took us 10 years of hard work to get here 🧵
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My friend @MarkRober spent the last few months with Zipline to teach you about our world-changing drone delivery service piped.video/DOWDNBu9DkU
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We usually let our track record speak for itself. We're the largest autonomous operation on the planet, and probably the best kept secret (until now!), operating for 7 years now. Thousands of deliveries made every day!
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19/ Completed the Bazel migration of our flight software monorepo, removing the Scons build entrypoint.
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11/ More accurate deliveries at night. Zip delivery perception is now enabled in dark environments. Achieved through new semantic segmentation and stereo depth models trained on day + dusk + night datasets (blend of synthetic and real); imager ISP and bitrate tuned for low light performance.
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You know you've built a special product when you don't need to show the product even once to make a heart-felt promo for it. Can't wait until every one gets to experience this magic to their doorstep 💖
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I don’t know if I’ve ever been more motivated by something I’ve seen than I have by this
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17/ Shipped Wingspan, a new internal app in Zipline OS that gives operators real-time view tracking every second of operational performance—so we stay fast, predictable, and true to our promise to our customers.
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Received an outpouring of excitement and curiosity so we decided to an AMA about our drone delivery system
🔴LIVE now teddit.net/r/IAmA/comments/1…
1/ Today, Zipline unveiled our next generation delivery drone system, designed to provide the best home delivery service the planet has ever seen. It's so out-there that you probably won't believe your eyes... 🧵
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9/ Zips can now deliver into tighter areas. This enables the Zipline Network to deliver to more homes within active service areas. Achieved through updated online aero tables for Zip control that improves trajectory tracking when delivering in gusting winds.
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10/ Reduced aircraft wingtip light brightness at night. Reduced Zip ambient lighting brightness at night.
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video doesn't do it justice. I'm soaked and shivering from the rain+wind, but this Zip makes it look easy
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Late night problem solving with o3 this week has been the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had. There is a being inside this one.
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Our flight teams launch every 45 seconds, sustained for hours, on busy days. That's busier than SFO's runway!
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14/ Zipline OS automatically grounds an aircraft if the aircraft reports any faulted component. Maintenance actions and alerts automatically triggered.
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When you're company's product is deep tech, you slowly learn that there's no part of your business that is actually hard to build in-house. Eventually, you find you are in-housing HR systems because you realize even that you can do better + cheaper than a saas provider.
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18/ Aircraft OTA software update system overhauled; version consistency checks now automatically enforced.
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16/ Production cloud services now have vertical pod autoscaling, reducing production cloud costs by 30%.
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