Drone-Delivery Expert on Amazon's Plans

"We need to design these vehicles to make sure they don’t represent a public risk. If we’re able to do that, we’re ready for primetime," Raptopoulosresponded. "The way to unlock regulatory approval is to show with really good data, 99.9999999—seven nines—percent reliability. Then, of course, you’ll have regulatory approval."

"People saying, 'We’re doing this kind of delivery in China.' Or talking about burritos, pizza, tacos, whatever. All this stuff is BS. In order to get the deliveries working as a system, the drones need to be reliable. Cars are reliable. Planes are reliable."

He continued, "There are three things you're trying to optimize for reliability: time, development, and keeping the cost per vehicle down. The more time and money and cost per vehicle you allow, the better the reliability. For Amazon’s application to make sense, the vehicle cost should be below $20,000. If its $100,000, it’s not cost-effective anymore."

But he saw reliability as far from an insurmountable problem. "It’s the same thing we have with every technology. We know we’ve been able to build much more complex machines. A 777 has thousands of moving parts, versus eight for a quadcopter. But the question is how quickly, for what level of money, for what reliability. These are the competing factors."

But won't you get sued if one crashes?

His company's plan, too, is to start deploying in places where the regulatory and litigation risks are lower. "The application changes your requirement of reliability," Raptopoulos said. "The FAA may require another level than authorities in Haiti. If you lose a vehicle in Palo Alto, you may be sued for millions of dollars. If you lose a vehicle in Haiti, you may not be sued at all. "

But maybe, Raptopoulos contends, there are ways to integrate drones into the airspace that would present a lower risk to everyone. "Maybe there is a way to fly these things on routes where you don’t risk anything where you lose them. It will take that kind of innovation. [To us] it makes sense to start this first in rural places and maybe in the third world. Then once we figure out how to do this at scale, we can bring it here."

What are the specific things that can be done to increase reliability?

"There are a lot of octocopters and a lot of quadcopters, but how do you design one that has the right redundancies? Should the vehicle have a parachute so when it has a catastrophic failure, it doesn’t just fall out of the sky? If you have one failure, can you diagnose and get it to a landing spot?"

Some of those problems may be solved by increasing the sophistication of the analytics they have on each drone. "How well can we predict failures? If we’ve flown 2.5 thousand hours and we have this kind of telemetric data, I might know I should retire the vehicle."

"You have to worry about specific problems in specific environments. In Haiti, you have to worry about dust. If you want to work in San Francisco, you have to have worry about GPS signals being lost because of the terrain."

Assuming you can work out the technology, why won't people just shoot them out of the sky?

"They fly at 400 feet between 45-65 kilometers an hour and they are very small. At that height, you can barely see them. You cannot hear them. It’s like a tiny dot moving in the sky. That’s the practical aspect of the question. It’s not going to be a bunch of kids doing it for fun," Raptopoulos said, raining on every kid's parade.

"The second point is that it’s illegal," he said. "The reason we’re not shooting other moving things with guns is because it’s not something that’s legal. It is more challenging to rely on that framework in a place like Haiti or Kenya or Mali. The risk there is higher."

But couldn't the drones get taken out when they land?

"As you pointed out, the vulnerable part of the mission is when they come down," he responded. "In our case, they do a vertical descent and then they go out again. And those locations need to be protected."

Thinking about the developing world contexts where Matternet is working, he continued. "You need to have them owned by people who use the system, and then you tap into the social dynamics. We're not planning to set up the networks in local places. We're just providing the technology. So, they have to be owned by people in the developing world that have the right social status," he said. "It would be people on the ground who understand how their location works. Those people are the experts on the ground. They know how to read the country and protect their assets."

What do you think of the regulatory hurdles in the U.S.?

"We’ve just had a public statement from a big company they want it to happen. Public acceptance goes hand in hand with regulation. There are many reasons that the public will see these as the wave of the future," he said. "But we cannot [make that case] that if we cannot guarantee to the public that this is a safe thing to be flying over our heads and our children."

So, let's say you can fly a few drone deliveries, does this actually work as a big business, the way Amazon seems to be imagining?

"Scale is a challenge in itself. For Amazon to do this, they don’t get to do 10 or 100 deliveries a day, they get to do thousands or hundreds of thousands of deliveries a day. How you resolve the scale issue is a question," Raptopoulos said. "But we’re pretty good at solving those challenges as a technical civilization."