Startup Wants to Use Drones to Deliver Medical Supplies. Drones can be deadly. They’re used in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to spy and take out suspected terrorists. But drones can be good too. We’ve already seen that their potentialextends beyond the battlefield. And other than delivering burritos, they can be used for humanitarian reasons as well, like delivering medical supplies to hard-to-reach areas.That’s the goal of a Palo Alto startup called Matternet, that wants to build a network of unmanned aerial vehicles to bring medicines and other important supplies in countries where some communities live in areas not served by usable roads.
“Imagine if we can deliver the medicine within hours or even minutes with a small autonomous flying device,” said Matternet CEO and founder Andreas Raptopoulos at last year’s PopTech conference, “The key here is the autonomy of the solution, there are no humans involved.” According to a case study Matternet did last year, building 50 base stations equipped with 150drones would cost $900,000. Andreas Raptopoulos: No roads? There's a drone for that. Monitor: An internet of airborne things. THE spread of mobile phones in developing countries in the past decade has delivered enormous social and economic benefits. By providing a substitute for travel, phones can make up for bad roads and poor transport infrastructure, helping traders find better prices and boosting entrepreneurship. But although information can be delivered by phone—and, in a growing number of countries, money transferred as well—there are some things that must be delivered physically.
For small items that are needed urgently, such as medicines, why not use drone helicopters to deliver them, bypassing the need for roads altogether? That, at least, was the idea cooked up last year at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley summer school where eager entrepreneurs gather in the hope of solving humanity’s grandest challenges with new technologies. The plan is to build a network of autonomously controlled, multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to carry small packages of a standardised size. Andreas Raptopoulos. Matternet solving physical transport: Andreas Raptopoulos - Solve for X | Change is. The Matternet Vision. Matternet UAV Delivery Drones. MatternetPeople try to dislodge a truck stuck in the mud in Papa New Guinea When Andreas Raptopoulos and his team got stuck in a 20-truck convoy completely marooned in mud while navigating between villages in Papua New Guinea, it was incredibly frustrating.
It was also a validation of his work. Raptopoulos is the cofounder and CEO of a startup called Matternet, which makes drones, though he refuses to use that word. He prefers to call them small unmanned aerial delivery vehicles, or UAVs. He started the company after having a "eureka moment" three years ago.
That's why Raptopoulos was in tuberculosis-ravaged Papua New Guinea in September, entrenched in mud. "We had to do that trip four times and every time there was an element of fear," Raptopoulos tells Business Insider. Matternet's trucks may have gotten lodged in mud between launch sites, but its drones navigated their routes without a hitch. Matternet For Raptopoulos, it felt like a series of "pinch me" moments. A revolutionary drone-based delivery network is being tested—in Bhutan.
It’s one of the world’s first drone-based delivery networks, but it’s not in the Silicon Valley. It’s in Shangri-la. A Silicon Valley startup is piloting a low-cost drone-based delivery project in the remote Himalayan nation of Bhutan that could save lives in far-flung rural communities—and perhaps pioneer the system globally. Bhutan has only 0.3 physicians per 1,000 people, according to the World Bank data, which is lower than larger regional countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the bigger problem for many Bhutanese is access. With 31 hospitals, 178 basic health unit clinics and 654 outreach clinics (as of 2011) serving a population of over 700,000, the challenge is to reach remote mountain communities on time and affordably.
With funds from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Scott and Cyan Banister and Winklevoss Capital, Matternet has spent the past couple of years conducting field tests in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Matternet » Field Trials. Moving What Matters With Matternet's Autonomous Drones - DRONELIFE. While Amazon and NASA are working to integrate drones into existing businesses and infrastructures, the future of commercial drones could lie with Matternet, a small Silicon Valley startup with big plans.
Matternet was formed out of a team from Singularity University in 2011 and has since received over a million dollars in funding from marquee investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Fadi Ghandour. Co-founders Andreas Raptopoulos and Paola Santana have each done their own TED Talks and appeared all over the web, including in an interview with Katie Couric. Matternet founders Paola Santana and Andreas Raptopoulos It’s clear Raptopoulos and Santana believe in drones and are itching to spread the word but how, exactly, is Matternet going to catapult drones into the mainstream?
A Network of Matter That Matters It is fairly well known Amazon wants to use drones to drop packages on your doorstep. The Matternet network has three components: the drone, the ground station and the software. Matternet in Bhutan. Bhutan is the country viewed by most westerners as an idyllic Shangri-La, squeezed between China and India, on southern slopes of Himalayas. It is the only country in the world that introduced Gross National Happiness index instead of Gross National Product.
Yet, by all standards it is not a wealthy country, with the GDP per capita of $7.000. That is perhaps best reflected in poor transport infrastructure, with only around 8.000 km of roads (of which less than 5.000 are paved), being on 140th place in world rankings. On the other side of the world, in Silicon Valley, a startup is developing a solution for the very same problem Bhutan is facing: how to solve transportation problems when there are no roads or the roads are impassable.
Matternet, has been working on this issue for quite some time now. However, due to the very problematic legislation for the UAV in the United States, Matternet was forced to perform its field tests in locations such as Haiti, and more recently, Bhutan.