Co-founder @zipline, using fleets of robot airplanes to approximate teleportation
San Francisco
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when Ziplines need maintenance, they fly themselves home. Increasingly, they fly home by hopping across our network of charging sites.
Today in Houston:
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Ryan Oksenhorn retweeted
@ryanzip amazing service as always 🙌🏼 I am taking advantage of the free delivery fee while I can👍🏼👍🏼
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the scale in this video from last year still blows my mind, but what's even wilder is that since filming this we've changed the system to deliver from >50% higher than what you see here in our obsessive quest to be silent & invisible
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More cool robotics demos today, but remember the Brittle Lesson: mechanical complexity is brittle in the real world. How many hours of real-world use will that hardware get before one of the 10k+ parts break?
Robotics companies have all accepted The Bitter Lesson and we now see awesome demos, but most have no idea about The Brittle Lesson and boy are they in for a surprise when trying to productize.
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The Brittle Lesson is coming for many robotics companies that will soon need to move from flashy demo → reliable product
Robotics companies have all accepted The Bitter Lesson and we now see awesome demos, but most have no idea about The Brittle Lesson and boy are they in for a surprise when trying to productize.
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Robotics companies have all accepted The Bitter Lesson and we now see awesome demos, but most have no idea about The Brittle Lesson and boy are they in for a surprise when trying to productize.
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Hardware is hard. Every sensor, every part, every degree of freedom is a burden. The more parts, the more failure points. That brittleness is the enemy, but this brittle lesson clearly hasn't been learned by most teams. Instead, you see them touting high DOF as a feat!
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Zipline's footprint in Africa is growing faster than at any point in our nearly ten years of operations. Exciting updates coming soon!
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seeing these wild Astra blender examples is bringing back this thought: Astra actually hits orbital velocity. It can stay up in orbit seemingly indefinitely, without decaying on its task over time.
Why things suddenly feel different after gradual progress: AI reached orbital velocity.
There is no value in a velocity 1m/s slower than orbital. But once you gain 1m/s....
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.@zipline now flies in Sport Mode
Dynamic Flight Trajectories are like hyper-miling: realtime modelling of wind, airspeed, lift, and drag optimizes speed + altitude profile to minimize time, energy, and noise.
Each Zipline refines its plan in flight as conditions change. We now climb while moving toward destination, descend to build airspeed, climb to slow down. We let gravity do more oft he hard work.
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