Here’s how one startup plans to dominate drone-based delivery

SANTA CRUZ, Calif.—One day soon, we will receive packages at our doorsteps, delivered by your local friendly drone.

Or at least, that’s the hope for a handful of drone delivery startups, some of which exhibited their wares Friday at the Drone Data X Conference in this coastal town less than an hour’s drive south of Silicon Valley.

There’s just one major problem: the Federal Aviation Administration requires that drone pilots maintain line-of-sight. So, an aerial courier company with a fleet of drones won’t be operating in the United States anytime soon. But drone startups are drawn to Silicon Valley for access to engineering talent and venture capital.

This has created a strange situation where there are a handful of drone startups that want to offer various flavors of automated delivery, but their services aren’t legal in the United States just yet.

"To get from where we are with aviation to where we want to be is a long way," Colin Snow, an independent drone analyst, told Ars.

Fly like an eagle

One of the most ambitious and well-positioned of these companies is Matternet, a nascent startup that has made a name by delivering medicine in rural areas of developing countries like Bhutan and Papua New Guinea. One of its co-founders, Andreas Raptopoulos, even gave a TED talk in 2013.

After emerging a few years ago from Singularity University, a sort of Silicon Valley startup school, Matternet made a few big announcements earlier this year including its first commercial product, the Matternet One.

Last month, the company trumpeted the fact that it would be conducting significant real-world tests this summer in a country with a developed air traffic network. In Switzerland, Matternet will be working with Swiss Post, Swiss WorldCargo, the air cargo division of Swiss International Air Lines.

"Can we make access to goods frictionless?" Raptopoulos posited to Ars after the conclusion of his Friday presentation at the conference, outlining how in developing countries road and transit infrastructure is often lacking.

The affable Greek entrepreneur outlined a near-future scenario that can deliver a one kilogram (2.2 pounds) payload at a distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) within 15 minutes.

Matternet, Raptopoulos hopes, will not only be conducting humanitarian missions, but would primarily be making money by leasing its quadcopters to other businesses for the purposes of making deliveries. The company plans to charge $1,000 per drone per month, which includes access to the company’s routing software (run in the cloud), and stripped-down smartphone apps which simply control the launch and delivery points. The company’s proprietary routing software explicitly routes around no-fly zones (airports, schools, military bases) and other objects that would obstruct its path, like buildings.

Eventually, the plan is to also create waypoints for the drones where they could automatically swap batteries (to extend their relatively limited range) and pick up and drop off cargo. (Right now a human is required to put in a new battery.)

A company like Whole Foods, Uber, or PostMates, for example, could maintain its own fleet of Matternet drones, and then deliver ordered goods via drone to customers within that city.

Safety first

Raptopoulos noted that he's conscious of safety, privacy and annoyance—three main factors that often concern the public during drone deployment.

"When I see a drone in the park, I go away," he said, worried that the pilot might accidentally crash into something near him. "Autonomy gives you a chance to remove that."

He also told Ars that the company is very interested in privacy, and maintains a policy—which seems to be unmentioned anywhere on the company’s website—of never storing images or video of what the drone sees.

"We have an obligation to keep people safe," he said, adding that Swiss authorities have required that the drones have on-board parachutes to deploy if it suddenly loses control.

The CEO told Ars that the company has raised $3 million in a seed round—including from Andreessen Horowitz, the Winklevoss twins, and others—and is in the middle of raising its Series A round at the moment.

But there’s still a big roadblock ahead.

"This only way this works is if autonomy is allowed," Raptopoulos said. "We bet the company on it."

Listing image by Matternet