TEDGlobal 2013
Andreas Raptopoulos: No roads? There's a drone for that
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A billion people in the world lack access to all-season roads. Could the structure of the internet provide a model for how to reach them? Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet thinks so. He introduces a new type of transportation system that uses electric autonomous flying machines to deliver medicine, food, goods and supplies wherever they are needed.
Andreas Raptopoulos - Airborne logistics activist
Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods to otherwise inaccessible areas. Full bio
Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods to otherwise inaccessible areas. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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One billion people in the world today
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do not have access to all-season roads.
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One billion people.
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One seventh of the Earth's population
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are totally cut off for some part of the year.
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We cannot get medicine to them reliably,
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they cannot get critical supplies,
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and they cannot get their goods to market
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in order to create a sustainable income.
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In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance,
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85 percent of roads are unusable in the wet season.
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Investments are being made,
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but at the current level,
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it's estimated it's going to take them
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50 years to catch up.
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In the U.S. alone, there's more than four million
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miles of roads, very expensive to build,
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very expensive to maintain infrastructure,
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with a huge ecological footprint,
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and yet, very often, congested.
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So we saw this and we thought,
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can there be a better way?
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Can we create a system using today's
most advanced technologies
most advanced technologies
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that can allow this part of the world to leapfrog
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in the same way they've done with mobile telephones
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in the last 10 years?
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Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today
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without ever putting copper lines in the ground.
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Could we do the same for transportation?
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Imagine this scenario.
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Imagine you are in a maternity ward in Mali,
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and have a newborn in need of urgent medication.
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What would you do today?
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Well, you would place a request via mobile phone,
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and someone would get the request immediately.
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That's the part that works.
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The medication may take days to arrive, though,
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because of bad roads.
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That's the part that's broken.
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We believe we can deliver it within hours
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with an electric autonomous flying vehicle
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such as this.
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This can transport a small payload
today, about two kilograms,
today, about two kilograms,
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over a short distance, about 10 kilometers,
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but it's part of a wider network that may cover
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the entire country, maybe even the entire continent.
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It's an ultra-flexible, automated logistics network.
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It's a network for a transportation of matter.
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We call it Matternet.
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We use three key technologies.
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The first is electric autonomous flying vehicles.
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The second is automated ground stations
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that the vehicles fly in and out of
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to swap batteries and fly farther,
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or pick up or deliver loads.
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And the third is the operating system
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that manages the whole network.
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Let's look at each one of those
technologies in a bit more detail.
technologies in a bit more detail.
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First of all, the UAVs.
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Eventually, we're going to be
using all sorts of vehicles
using all sorts of vehicles
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for different payload capacities and different ranges.
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Today, we're using small quads.
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These are able to transport two kilograms
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over 10 kilometers in just about 15 minutes.
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Compare this with trying to trespass a bad road
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in the developing world,
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or even being stuck in traffic
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in a developed world country.
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These fly autonomously.
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This is the key to the technology.
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So they use GPS and other sensors on board
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to navigate between ground stations.
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Every vehicle is equipped with an automatic
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payload and battery exchange mechanism,
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so these vehicles navigate to those ground stations,
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they dock, swap a battery automatically,
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and go out again.
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The ground stations are located on safe locations
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on the ground.
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They secure the most vulnerable part of the mission,
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which is the landing.
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They are at known locations on the ground,
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so the paths between them are also known,
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which is very important from a reliability perspective
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from the whole network.
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Apart from fulfilling the energy
requirements of the vehicles,
requirements of the vehicles,
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eventually they're going to be becoming
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commercial hubs where people can take out loads
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or put loads into the network.
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The last component is the operating system
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that manages the whole network.
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It monitors weather data from all the ground stations
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and optimizes the routes of
the vehicles through the system
the vehicles through the system
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to avoid adverse weather conditions,
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avoid other risk factors,
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and optimize the use of the resources
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throughout the network.
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I want to show you what one of those flights
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looks like.
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Here we are flying in Haiti last summer,
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where we've done our first field trials.
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We're modeling here a medical delivery
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in a camp we set up after the 2010 earthquake.
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People there love this.
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And I want to show you
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what one of those vehicles looks like up close.
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So this is a $3,000 vehicle.
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Costs are coming down very rapidly.
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We use this in all sorts of weather conditions,
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very hot and very cold climates,
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very strong winds. They're very sturdy vehicles.
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Imagine if your life depended on this package,
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somewhere in Africa
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or in New York City, after Sandy.
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The next big question is, what's the cost?
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Well, it turns out that the cost to transport
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two kilograms over 10 kilometers with this vehicle
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is just 24 cents.
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(Applause)
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And it's counterintuitive, but the cost of energy
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expended for the flight is only two cents
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of a dollar today,
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and we're just at the beginning of this.
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When we saw this, we felt that this is something
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that can have significant impact in the world.
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So we said, okay, how much does it cost
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to set up a network somewhere in the world?
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And we looked at setting up a network in Lesotho
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for transportation of HIV/AIDS samples.
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The problem there is how do you take them
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from clinics where they're being collected
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to hospitals where they're being analyzed?
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And we said, what if we wanted to cover an area
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spanning around 140 square kilometers?
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That's roughly one and a half times
the size of Manhattan.
the size of Manhattan.
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Well it turns out that the cost to do that there
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would be less than a million dollars.
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Compare this to normal infrastructure investments.
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We think this can be -- this is the power
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of a new paradigm.
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So here we are: a new idea
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about a network for transportation
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that is based on the ideas of the Internet.
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It's decentralized, it's peer-to-peer,
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it's bidirectional, highly adaptable,
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with very low infrastructure investment,
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very low ecological footprint.
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If it is a new paradigm, though,
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there must be other uses for it.
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It can be used perhaps in other places in the world.
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So let's look at the other end of the spectrum:
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our cities and megacities.
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Half of the Earth's population lives in cities today.
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Half a billion of us live in megacities.
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We are living through an amazing urbanization trend.
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China alone is adding a megacity
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the size of New York City every two years.
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These are places that do have road infrastructure,
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but it's very inefficient.
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Congestion is a huge problem.
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So we think it makes sense in those places
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to set up a network of transportation
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that is a new layer that sits between the road
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and the Internet,
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initially for lightweight, urgent stuff,
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and over time, we would hope to develop this
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into a new mode of transportation
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that is truly a modern solution to a very old problem.
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It's ultimately scalable
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with a very small ecological footprint,
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operating in the background 24/7,
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just like the Internet.
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So when we started this
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a couple of years ago now,
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we've had a lot of people come up to us who said,
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"This is a very interesting but crazy idea,
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and certainly not something that you should
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engage with anytime soon."
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And of course, we're talking about drones, right,
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a technology that's not only unpopular in the West
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but one that has become a very, very unpleasant
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fact of life for many living in poor countries,
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especially those engaged in conflict.
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So why are we doing this?
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Well, we chose to do this one
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not because it's easy,
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but because it can have amazing impact.
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Imagine one billion people being connected
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to physical goods in the same way
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that mobile telecommunications connected them
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to information.
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Imagine if the next big network we built in the world
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was a network for the transportation of matter.
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In the developing world, we would hope
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to reach millions of people with better vaccines,
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reach them with better medication.
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It would give us an unfair advantage against battling
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HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other epidemics.
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Over time, we would hope it would become
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a new platform for economic transactions,
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lifting millions of people out of poverty.
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In the developed world and the emerging world,
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we would hope it would become a new mode
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of transportation that could help make our cities
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more livable.
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So for those that still believe
that this is science fiction,
that this is science fiction,
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I firmly say to you that it is not.
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We do need to engage, though,
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in social fiction to make it happen.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andreas Raptopoulos - Airborne logistics activistAndreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods to otherwise inaccessible areas.
Why you should listen
It's a modern-day truism that, in regions where the phone company never bothered to lay network cable, locals quickly adopted mobile phones -- and then innovated mobile services that go far beyond what so-called developed countries have. Could the same pattern hold true with roads?
Andreas Raptopoulos is hoping to find out with Matternet, a project that uses swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver urgent items -- think emergency and medical supplies -- to places where there are no driveable roads. Imagine a sort of flying bucket brigade or relay race, where autonomous quadricopters pass packages around a flexible network that behaves something like the internet -- but for real goods.
Raptopoulos is a designer, inventor and entrepreneur. Prior to Matternet, he founded FutureAcoustic, a music platform that adjusts to the listener's environment.
Andreas Raptopoulos | Speaker | TED.com