Perhaps it's just a poor video for an otherwise awesome project, but it just comes across as a load of disconnected ideas.
What's the 3D dome for?
How does the drone delivery work?
It has a social-good and humanitarian angle - awesome, but I don't see how printing 3D statues and a dome fit into that...
etc
I guess the video just left me wanting more explanation.
Sure, and if they had called themselves artists no one would have questioned this. Where they go wrong is when they throw the term "humanitarian" around to describe something that is anything but.
My name is Arturo Pelayo, I am co-founder of ARIA (Autonomous Roadless Intelligent Array, on the web here: www.Aria-Logistics.com). I want to explain that we have been working with ReAllocate in this project since June (http://aria-logistics.com/reallocate-collaboration/).
ARIA is an open source autonomous logistics infrastructure that leapfrogs traditional road infrastructure and unlocks economic opportunity.
While the IndieGoGo video might appear to be disconnected, there is a flow to all of them because we have been building them for over a year both ARIA on its own by using open source UAVs and ReAllocate by trying to solve 'the last mile' problem by building in-country capacity using retrofitted shipping containers.
Back in June, both ARIA and ReAllocate saw an alignment as ReAllocate wanted to do a drone project for Burning Man. Between both groups, we drafted an open call through Chris Anderson's DIY Drones Community and ARIA also began the process of creating awareness of this collaboration on the website.
ARIA also sought out media coverage through contacts at Wired, Fast Company and other publications. Fast Company published an article about it over a week ago and you can read it here:
You will see that the Fast Company article above focuses on ARIA as a company that began last Summer when four of ARIA's cofounders met at Singularity University for the 11-week Graduate Studies Program. During that time worked on 'Matternet': a network of autonomous vehicles that could be used to deliver high-value goods to remote regions of the world with no roads.
The Graduate Studies Program focuses on teaching technologies that are changing very quickly, are dropping in cost, are following Moore's Law and that are being integrated into the mainstream (these are called 'exponential technologies').
The comments so far in Y Combinator refer to a lot of "disconnected ideas". 3D printing is expensive at the moment but we believe it will become so cheap in the next decade that it will become obliquitous to the point that farmers in remote areas of the planet could request from their cellphones replacement parts for a broken tractor just by taking a picture of the broken part and an Artificial Intelligence component would analyze the image, determine what is broken and send to a 3D printer in a shipping container a request for it to be printed, billed to the customer and sent to their dynamic GPS location on their cellphone (sound familiar??) -- this is where the analog was realized and we joined efforts to build the project together.
Shipping containers are being considered also by ARIA since last year when the concept was first conceived as they are very easily found worldwide and are extremely cheap. There are over 600 million containers being used each year for the global transport of raw materials and products across the planet, ARIA saw shipping containers as the building block of a standardized structure that could be used as a ground station to host vehicles and recharge batteries. Because these containers would be located in areas of no roads, they would have to use renewable energy sources to charge batteries that power the UAVs that fly in a 10Km radius.
The network of shipping containers thus becomes also a distributed micro-grid that is smart and that can route packages from one station to another. Think of it as The Pony Express 2.0 .
As you can see, there are many ideas being put together and we are working hard at this at ARIA.
You're confusing Y Combinator with Hacker News; they're related but different.
The video is poor because it's inconsistent; it starts by saying that Reallocate aims to "solve specific humanitarian issues" and then explains that the first project is to build statues of people attending Burning Man and delivering them via what appears to be AR Drones from Parrot.
Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?
There's nothing wrong with building 3D sculptures of people at Burning Man; but it's bizarre to call this a humanitarian endeavor -- even if "in the next decade" this technology may be used to order parts for "broken tractors".
Also, the speaker in the video talks too fast and drops her voice at the end of sentences, making her speech hard to hear / difficult to engage with.
> The video is poor because it's inconsistent; it starts by saying that Reallocate aims to "solve specific humanitarian issues" and then explains that the first project is to build statues of people attending Burning Man and delivering them via what appears to be AR Drones from Parrot.
Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?
Unfortunately, they only make sense if you've already read articles on Matternet. It's wise not to beta-test infrastructure before it's beta-ready, so customers aren't alienated. A bottle of pills can be expensive to us in the 1st world. They are even more dear in the 3rd. Better to lose some Burner's statue than some patient's prescription.
>Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?
I can't help but feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Nowhere in that video did it claim that the Burning Man test run was a pressing humanitarian issue.
Its clear this is just to raise awareness/funds in support of the longer-term goal. The "no pressure" field-test aspect of it probably doesn't hurt either.
The 3D statues are perfect analogs for possible delivery services. Many companies in the healthcare sector have begun looking at 3D printing for building pills and prevent counterfeit medicine which is also a huge issue worldwide.
using open source UAVs and ReAllocate by trying to
solve 'the last mile' problem [...] a network of
autonomous vehicles that could be used to deliver
high-value goods [...] technologies that are
changing very quickly, are dropping in cost, are
following Moore's Law and that are being integrated
into the mainstream (these are called 'exponential
technologies').
Interesting. I've heard one of the limiting factors in quadrotor drone technology is battery energy density. You want long range so you add more batteries, then the drone is too heavy to take off. And battery technology doesn't double in performance every 18 months. Would you say this is accurate?
Can a quadrotor drone can outperform a local on a bicycle? Or do you have an alternative technology in mind? What kind of payload and flight range do you think you'll achieve?
Hate to be a negative nelly here, but what really turned me off about this project is how narcissistic it seemed. Offering folks at burning man autonomous robots that will deliver miniature statues of themselves seems the furthest thing from something that could actually help the world.
And then to top it off the whole thing is being made into a TV show? Count me out.
> Offering folks at burning man autonomous robots that will deliver miniature statues of themselves seems the furthest thing from something that could actually help the world.
That's not the end goal. If you can deliver a tchotchke to someone, you can also deliver a bottle of pills, documents, cellphone batteries, a Raspberry Pi, or small craft items. Remember that lots of places in the 3rd world don't have roads. Lots of places aren't even very passable by foot in parts of the year. Having any kind of infrastructure at all is a win and will enable better healthcare and more economic activity.
What better way to test such a service than to send trivialities to 1st and 0th worlders? No one's going to die if they don't get their statue, and they might even donate to the cause anyhow. Someone might die without their pills, or their business might take a big hit without a part or a battery. Better to practice on the Burners than on people who actually need it.
Thanks for the response, it really got me thinking. I was about to tear down your critique bit by bit -- you think healthcare is all about delivering pills? -- what do you know about roads in the 3rd world -- etc, etc -- but then I realized something vis a vis the 3rd world road analogy.
Why aren't the positioning the autonomous drone delivery network as something that is more useful for the first world? I think running drone networks to deliver medicine and small good is merely a stopgap measure to building roads. And once roads are built, I feel that real economic growth can finally commence.
<aside>In fact, having this drone delivery network in the 3rd world may retard the development of roads; roads will only be needed to transport big things, and people can get by with continuous delivery of small things via autonomous drones, thus it will take longer for roads to be built because there will be less demand.</aside>
If this dialectic between roads and these drones exists the 3rd world (or rather, our idealized 3rd world with no roads), what about the first? Couldn't these drones be used to reduce the number of delivery trucks, as small, light items would simply be delivered by drone? Think of the reduction in carbon emissions and the reduced cost of road maintenance that would be the result of shrinking fleets of delivery trucks.
The above scenario, I feel, would make for a better pitch video. Showing me how this network can be scaled to improve the environment (and roads) around me is going to make me much more likely to open my wallet than telling me a story about some imaginary farmer with a broken tractor part that can be printed up with a 3D printer.
> I was about to tear down your critique bit by bit -- you think healthcare is all about delivering pills? -- what do you know about roads in the 3rd world
It's good you didn't because the 1st one would be putting words in my mouth, and it's apparent I know a little bit more about roads in the 3rd world than you do. (I've actually traveled and worked in parts of the world where there are no roads whatsoever, no electricity/gas/landlines/mobile whatsoever, locals have to take a boat 2 miles on the river to get their mail, and planes have to land on the beach.)
> I think running drone networks to deliver medicine and small good is merely a stopgap measure to building roads. And once roads are built, I feel that real economic growth can finally commence.
You should read the Matternet site. That is exactly the idea. It's a good hand-up idea. Once you enable healthcare, government, and economic activity, you enable the local population to build and maintain real infrastructure. Drones are interesting precisely because they are potentially low cost and "better than nothing."
> In fact, having this drone delivery network in the 3rd world may retard the development of roads; roads will only be needed to transport big things, and people can get by with continuous delivery of small things via autonomous drones, thus it will take longer for roads to be built because there will be less demand.
Unlikely. Drones are simply better than nothing. Once you have more economic activity, then you have the local economic base for real infrastructure, like roads.
Delivery in what you describe as "the first world" can only happen when FAA and Air Space regulations change. Currently this is not the case and the Obama administration has proposed to open up the air space for commercial applications in 2014.
The regulations are only the first, there is also ITAR which prevents you from selling drones in the first place.
I agree that there will be much better application in cities. It is all part of building a roadless world and this is what we are doing at ARIA.
As for "imaginary farmers", I am glad you see different applications of the network. Since ARIA is focused on building infrastructure and NOT final applications, I think you should pursue such application.
We believe we are at the dawn of a roadless economy. An open backbone that can handle traffic control and prevent high-speed collisions of tiny UAVs is needed.
I hope they're going to open up the delivery technology, either to allow someone to commoditize it, and make it available to consumers (for taco delivery), or other noble causes, like rescue, etc..
Additionally, I'm somewhat curious as to what their plan is on Oakland.
I would guess that they are going to use a commercial or open-source autopilot like Ardupilot. The GPS tech on these are pretty good for hobby/recreation but I highly doubt they are writing their own GPS/autopilots for this. Frankly, I just don't think the accuracy/reliability is there yet for these RC helicopters to effectively deliver goods. (Speaking from experience and my own multi-copters)
Matternet was a concept developed by a multidisciplinary team of 18 people at Singularity Univiersity in August 2011.
Since October 2011, two groups formed: Matternet, Inc and ARIA .
ARIA formed because we want to stay true to the original summer concept of building an OPEN SOURCE NETWORK were the DIY movement can find applications to be developed within it.
In the original Fast Company article when I was interviewed, I specified to Ariel that while ARIA is fully open-source, Matternet was proprietary (this is the last we knew when the two groups formed).
Because the CEO of Matternet Inc contacted Ariel to have the story changed, it no longer reads "proprietary technology" but "undisclosed".
I can see drone delivery to be quite useful in far-flung communities (Alaska, Australian Outback, Africa, etc.), to deliver critical stuff (medicines, critical components, etc.). Assuming the drone doesn't use a ton of fuel, it could literally be a life-saver.
Very excited to learn about this project, and hoping it literally takes off.
Surely they mean Burning Man 2013. Burning Man starts 6 days after this fundraiser ends and I don't seem much here to show they have anything even close to a working version.
"No, Tacocopter is nothing more than a product concept created by Star Simpson, an MIT grad who stumbled into the limelight in 2007 after being arrested for wearing a hoax explosive device comprised of a circuit board and green LEDs." - wired.com (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/03/qa-with-tacocopter/)
How are addressing the fact that autonomous drones are not yet zoned for commercial use? As far as I know accepting money for delivery of these 3D printed statues constitutes non-recreational use, Burning man or not.
I'm genuinely curious, does this not apply? Do you have some kind of special exemption?
What's the 3D dome for? How does the drone delivery work? It has a social-good and humanitarian angle - awesome, but I don't see how printing 3D statues and a dome fit into that...
etc
I guess the video just left me wanting more explanation.