无人机送货，为什么喊了十几年，却迟迟没能走进普通居民区？噪音扰民、落点不准、安全隐患，一直是横在面前的难关。Zipline另辟蹊径，用带缆线的配送吊舱，打造低噪音空中投递方案，它能否让无人机配送真正走进千家万户？
WITH BARELY A WHIR of propeller noise, we’ve got incoming: At the top of a grassy hill, next to a simulated suburban backyard—lawn chairs, a wooden play structure, the works—a smooth-cornered white box about the size of a gym bag drops out of the sky. It looks like a pre-CGI special effect because I can see the line—specifically, the one connecting the pod to a drone hovering about 260 feet up, only just visible against the overcast sky. A dinner plate–size rotor at the box’s rear spins as the box course-corrects in midair and then sets down on four small gray fins.
The delivery is here. It’s a demo, but the same basic system is operating thousands of times a day in Arkansas and across neighborhoods in Texas, where Zipline is flying these drone-and-pod combos to carry a Chipotle burrito bowl or the cat’s special food to people’s homes.
Keenan Wyrobek, Zipline’s chief technology officer, ushers me over to the drone-pod and clicks open its clamshell lid to show off the insulated, carbon-fiber-paneled interior. If we were, say, a local deli, this is how we’d load sandwiches for the drone to deliver. During a drop-off, doors on the bottom would slide open, and whatever the pod was carrying would fall about an inch to the ground. It’s meant to be easy, simple and safe. Wyrobek clicks the door shut. Most users get it right.
Had we blown it, the electric motor would’ve grunted, and a red light would’ve flashed. But all is well. We back away, and the pod rises up into the belly of the drone, which flies off. I’m expecting the angry-mosquito noise of a typical quadcopter, but it never comes.
At this testing facility, on a cattle ranch an hour south of San Francisco, Zipline is staging a distinctly old-school kind of future: actual flying robots. “That requires solving a lot of near-edge-of-physics technical problems,” says Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Zipline’s CEO. “You need the vehicle to be very aerodynamically efficient to have a meaningful range. You need an energy-dense battery. You need special electric motors designed from scratch to be incredibly light.”
That tomorrow may now be in sight. For more than a decade drone delivery has been the tech industry’s easiest joke: the demo that never became a service. Zipline argues otherwise. Its global network, built largely on its earlier fixed-wing aircraft, has flown more than 130 million autonomous miles and made more than 2.5 million commercial deliveries. And a proposed Federal Aviation Administration rule known as Part 108 could give drone delivery companies a clearer path for flights beyond operators’ sightlines. What’s being tested in the suburbs is whether the aircraft can be quiet enough to live under, precise enough to find a backyard and safe enough to share neighborhood airspace at scale—and whether anyone wants it.
A decade ago Zipline’s drones did a different kind of delivery—moving medical laboratory samples and blood products in Ghana and Rwanda between metropolitan areas and remote clinics. The service used fixed-wing drones, bite-size planes, launched by magnetic slingshot. They dropped their cargo by parachute and were then caught midair by tailhooks and towlines like those on an aircraft carrier.
That service continues to help a lot of people. In Ghana, facilities using Zipline had vaccine “stock-outs”—times when no vaccines were in stock—that were 60 percent shorter than those in clinics that didn’t work with Zipline. A 2022 review by researchers in Rwanda found blood products delivered by Zipline to mountainous areas arrived more than an hour and a half earlier than those carried by truck, leading to a 67 percent reduction in expiration losses.
Those slingshot-and-catch drones and parachute drops were made for long-range missions and
Adam Rogers
is a journalist covering science, technology and culture. A former editor at Business Insider, senior correspondent and editor at Business Insider, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Zipline公司正在测试一款带缆线配送吊舱。螺旋桨几乎悄无声息，配送物来了：在一座长满青草的小山顶上，一处模拟的郊区后院旁——摆放着草坪躺椅、木质游乐设施，一应俱全——一个边角圆润、健身包大小的白色盒子从天而降。画面仿佛是早期电脑特效，因为我能看见那根缆线：它将配送吊舱和悬停在约260英尺高空的无人机相连，在阴天的天幕下，无人机只能勉强看见。盒子尾部有餐盘大小的旋翼，在空中调整落点，随后依靠四片灰色小鳍平稳落地。
配送已经实现。这虽然是一场演示，但这套基础系统每天在阿肯色州以及德州多个社区运行上千次。Zipline利用这种无人机+吊舱组合，把Chipotle墨西哥卷碗、猫咪专用粮送到居民家中。
Zipline首席技术官基南·怀罗贝克带我走到无人机吊舱旁，掀开蚌壳式舱盖，展示内部隔热的碳纤维舱体。假设我们是一家本地熟食店，就可以这样把三明治装进吊舱，交由无人机配送。投递时，吊舱底部舱门滑开，里面的货物会向下落大约一英寸落到地面。这套设计追求简单、便捷、安全。怀罗贝克合上舱门，绝大多数用户都能轻松上手。
如果操作失误，电机会发出闷响，红灯也会闪烁。但这次一切顺利。我们向后退开，吊舱向上收进无人机机身，无人机随即飞走。我本以为会听到普通四轴无人机那种恼人的蚊子般嗡鸣，可噪音并没有出现。
这个测试场地位于旧金山以南一小时车程的牧场，Zipline在这里展示一种颇具传统质感的未来图景：真正能飞行的机器人。Zipline首席执行官凯勒·里纳多·克利夫顿说：“这需要攻克大量接近物理极限的技术难题。飞行器必须拥有极高的空气动力学效率，才能实现可观续航；需要能量密度高的电池；还要从零设计特制电机，做到极致轻量化。”
这样的明天，如今似乎已经近在眼前。十多年来，无人机配送一直是科技圈的经典笑谈：永远停留在演示阶段，无法落地成服务。Zipline却不这么认为。它的全球配送网络主要依托早期固定翼无人机，已经完成超1.3亿英里自主飞行，执行超250万次商业配送。美国联邦航空管理局拟出台的108号法规，或将为无人机企业开辟超视距飞行的清晰通道。
如今在郊区测试，核心要验证几件事：飞行器噪音是否低到可以在居民区上空运行、定位精度能否精准找到后院、大规模运行时能否安全共享社区空域，以及人们到底是否需要这项服务。
十年前，Zipline无人机承担的是另一类配送任务：在加纳、卢旺达的城市与偏远诊所之间运送医学检测样本和血液制品。这套系统使用固定翼小型无人机，依靠磁力弹射起飞。货物通过降落伞投放，无人机则依靠尾钩与缆绳在空中回收，原理类似航空母舰舰载机。
这项服务至今仍在惠及大量民众。在加纳，使用Zipline的医疗站点疫苗断供时长，比没有合作Zipline的诊所缩短60%。卢旺达研究人员2022年的一项评估显示：Zipline运送至山区的血液制品，比卡车运输早至少一个半小时送达，血液报废损耗降低67%。
