Is this the world’s zippiest commercial delivery drone?
Zipline has unveiled a new UAV which it claims is “the fastest commercial delivery drone on earth”.
In a statement issued on Tuesday (3 April), Zipline said that its newest generation of autonomous aircraft “flies farther, faster and with more cargo than was ever before possible— even in high altitude, heavy wind, or rain”.
Zipline said that has undertaken a “complete redesign” of its logistics system, which “dramatically improves” the drone’s launch, autonomous flight, and landing capabilities.
According to Zipline: “The improvements will decrease the amount of time between Zipline’s receipt of an order and launch of a fulfilment flight from 10 minutes to 1, increase the number of daily delivery flights that each Zipline distribution center can make from 50 to 500, and expand the radius of each distribution center to serve populations of up to 10 million people.”
Zipline’s new delivery vehicle is an autonomous “fixed-wing” style airplane (as opposed to the “quadcopter” style drones with rotary blades which tend to predominate in the parcel delivery space). The plane is capable of flying at a top speed of 128 km/h, and a cruising speed of 101 km/h – which Zipline says is 21 km/h faster than the previous generation of aircraft. It has a round trip range of 160km carrying up to 1.75kg of cargo.
According to Zipline, itsnew plane is capable of flying four times faster than the average quadcopter drone and can serve an area 200 times as large. (Although it should be noted that quadcopters can take off and land vertically and also hover in one spot – which are useful assets for parcel delivery operations.)
“Our first generation aircraft and logistics system allowed us to create the first and only drone delivery service in the world, which is helping to save lives in Rwanda every day,” said Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo. “We’ve taken everything Zipline has learned making thousands of life-critical deliveries and flying hundreds of thousands of kilometres and redesigned our entire system and operation from top to bottom. The new aircraft and distribution center system we’re unveiling today will help Zipline scale to meet the needs of countries around the world—including the United States.”
