Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: If you live in the Dallas Fort Worth area, there
Speaker 2: is a good chance that right now you can open
Speaker 2: up an app on your phone and order a cup
Speaker 2: of coffee or a bottle of ibuprofen from a nearby Walmart,
Speaker 2: and then about fifteen minutes later, a drone will appear
Speaker 2: hovering in the sky above your yard. The drone will
Speaker 2: lower down a rope that holds a box that has
Speaker 2: your ibuprofen in it. Then the drone will leave the
Speaker 2: box on the ground, pull up the rope and fly away.
Speaker 2: People have been talking about drone delivery for a long
Speaker 2: time now. There have been pilot programs and test sites,
Speaker 2: but this thing in Dallas is big. Millions of people
Speaker 2: live in the delivery zone. It's the first place in
Speaker 2: the US where for lots and lots of people, drone
Speaker 2: delivery seems set to become a normal, everyday thing. I'm
Speaker 2: Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show
Speaker 2: where I talk to people who are trying to make
Speaker 2: technological progress. My guest today is Adam Woodworth. Adam is
Speaker 2: the CEO of Wing. Wing is owned by Alphabet and
Speaker 2: it's one of the two drone companies doing deliveries for
Speaker 2: Walmart in Dallas. Wing has also been making deliveries in
Speaker 2: Australia for several years now. Adam's problem is this, how
Speaker 2: do you turn a delivery drone into something as boring
Speaker 2: and ubiquitous as a shopping cart? To start, I asked
Speaker 2: Adam to make the case for his project, like, why
Speaker 2: should I be happy to learn that delivery drones may
Speaker 2: soon be coming to a sky near me delivering coffee
Speaker 2: and burritos to my neighbors.
Speaker 3: I've caught a lot of flack over the years for
Speaker 3: the burrito copter, and like, oh, you're just using drones
Speaker 3: to fire around and deliver cups coffee and stuff. But
Speaker 3: at the core of it, like people eat food every day,
Speaker 3: Like if you look at it from a holistic transportation perspective,
Speaker 3: like people are not going to stop ordering things, Like
Speaker 3: that's not like it's in fact the opposite. People are
Speaker 3: ordering more stuff every day. And it just does not
Speaker 3: make sense that we are moving around like burritos and
Speaker 3: cups of coffee in cars, Like it just does not
Speaker 3: make sense.
Speaker 2: To what extent are people ordering coffee delivered by somebody
Speaker 2: in a car? Is that a thing?
Speaker 3: And I just don't know it. It is a thing.
Speaker 3: It is a thing like you can go sort of
Speaker 3: look up. There's been a myriad of different studies about
Speaker 3: sort of what actual sort of like dipler use cases are,
Speaker 3: and it's a lot of small items. I can I
Speaker 3: can talk about a bunch of aviation math, but I
Speaker 3: think the simplest way to look at it is we
Speaker 3: are designing systems like to be able to fly in
Speaker 3: the national airspace. This is the same for everybody who's
Speaker 3: sort of in here to be building systems that are
Speaker 3: like sort of equivalent level of safety to like airliners.
Speaker 3: So if you take that and you abstract it down
Speaker 3: to things that people can sort of internalize in terms
Speaker 3: of sort of risk, it is safer to fly the
Speaker 3: package via drone than it is to walk the package
Speaker 3: in your hand down the sidewalk.
Speaker 2: That's good, that's compelling, that's fun. Non intuitive, it's very
Speaker 2: non intuitive. I thought you were gonna say safer than
Speaker 2: to drive, and I'd be like, sure.
Speaker 3: Everything everything, but like safer than to hand carry it.
Speaker 2: The risk of hand caring is getting hit by a car.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's it's usually serve pedestrian road risk. And so
Speaker 3: you have this form of transportation which is possible and
Speaker 3: real and financially viable. That is many orders of magnitude
Speaker 3: safer than the incumbent. If you look at on every
Speaker 3: metric from safety to emissions, sort of impact on infrastructure,
Speaker 3: It's like, it is silly that we are moving around
Speaker 3: these boxes and the way we do today. This is
Speaker 3: a fundamentally better way to do it.
Speaker 2: So if I want to order something, I live near
Speaker 2: Walmart in Dallas and I want to order something from you, Like,
Speaker 2: how does that part work?
Speaker 3: So basically like we built a pretty traditional looking marketplace
Speaker 3: where the order flow is very traditional until you get
Speaker 3: to the part at the end, which is the drone part.
Speaker 2: So I use your app. I don't use like the
Speaker 2: Walmart app.
Speaker 3: So it depends on which region you're in. So in
Speaker 3: Australia we're integrated into the door Dash app, So use
Speaker 3: the front end of door Dash. In the US right
Speaker 3: now we're integrate. We're using our own app. Okay, So
Speaker 3: you say what you want ordered, and then before you
Speaker 3: even get to that step, the back end will say
Speaker 3: is your address deliverable? Right? Like it is the place
Speaker 3: that you are, a place that the plane can get
Speaker 3: to just to be.
Speaker 2: Clear that is you checking it out. You're using basically
Speaker 2: satellite data to say does this address work? Or that's
Speaker 2: you asking music. No, that's you just checking.
Speaker 3: So it's just basic. And some of it is even
Speaker 3: like like if there's a big hill that the plane
Speaker 3: has to spend more energy climbing over, like you might
Speaker 3: be within the radius, but like your particular house like
Speaker 3: may be undeliverable, or you might be slightly outside of
Speaker 3: the radius because there's no there's no power lines or
Speaker 3: hills to get there, so the plane go slightly farther.
Speaker 3: So everybody thinks about a delivery area as a circle,
Speaker 3: but it's really like a weird amiba.
Speaker 2: With lots of variables affecting where you can go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so there's a there's a sort of there's
Speaker 3: an address checker that'll run that like just GPS coordinate
Speaker 3: through a terrain database to be like can the plane
Speaker 3: get there? And then once you get to check out,
Speaker 3: you'll be presented with either one delivery zone of like okay,
Speaker 3: this is the place on your property where the box
Speaker 3: can be dropped off, or a choice like if there's
Speaker 3: multiple spots, it'll be like okay, which one of these three,
Speaker 3: do you want it in the left side of your
Speaker 3: yards sell the ardor in the backyard the personal pick that.
Speaker 3: Then the order will process, the plane will be dispatched,
Speaker 3: and then it'll go to like a sort of countdown
Speaker 3: of like, Okay, the plane is on its way and
Speaker 3: it'll be here in three minutes and forty two seconds.
Speaker 2: So uh, and and what's the cost?
Speaker 3: It depends it's uh, it's sort of uh. That's that's
Speaker 3: that's more of a partner question.
Speaker 2: What's it what's it cost you?
Speaker 3: That's a that's an unanswerable question.
Speaker 2: A lot right, now, A lot right?
Speaker 3: No, I mean I think, uh, I think less than
Speaker 3: less than what folks would assume.
Speaker 2: I mean, the marginal cost is low, right, but it's
Speaker 2: not that many deliveries against a large fixed costs.
Speaker 3: That's fair. But the marginal metrics are all sort of
Speaker 3: you know, favorable or in the direction of favorable. Yeah. So,
Speaker 3: like you know, people are well accustomed to getting stuff
Speaker 3: delivered today, and so like those costs are well understood,
Speaker 3: and the sort of costs per delivery that you know,
Speaker 3: either is either the partner is charging they're sort of
Speaker 3: all in line with that, depending on sort of which
Speaker 3: region you're in. But that's that's ultimately up to the partner.
Speaker 2: A few bucks, I mean, is is that what that means?
Speaker 2: Reason which you know it can't be more than that
Speaker 2: if people are out in coffee, right though, it is
Speaker 2: amazing how much people spend on, you know, on the
Speaker 2: marginal thing. So so that's how it works from the
Speaker 2: consumer's point of view, How does it work from you know,
Speaker 2: from the drones point of view. From from the company's point.
Speaker 3: Of view, what happens every every morning the service turns on,
Speaker 3: Folks can can order the stuff. Planes will get automatically
Speaker 3: tasked to go take off, pick up the box and go.
Speaker 2: How many deliveries what they do in a day?
Speaker 3: Like our high water mark right now is around for
Speaker 3: one store was about like one hundred and thirty deliveries, okay,
Speaker 3: So it's like these are like, these are real numbers.
Speaker 3: This isn't like like, oh okay, like three people ordered
Speaker 3: stuff today, And I think that that's the that's I
Speaker 3: think sort of the phase that the industry is moving
Speaker 3: into now is it's it's these aren't like pilot programs
Speaker 3: and trials. These are like, okay, this store opened up
Speaker 3: offering this service and all the people in the area
Speaker 3: expect to get that service.
Speaker 2: How how big and how heavy can something be?
Speaker 3: So you know, we carry about a little bit over
Speaker 3: a kilo of of of good, so you know, two
Speaker 3: point two pounds of stuff, and in.
Speaker 2: Terms of volume, like.
Speaker 3: Like I think about like a shoe box, shoe box
Speaker 3: ish shoe box, okay, And a lot of it ends
Speaker 3: up being you know, prepared food, drinks like you know,
Speaker 3: soft drinks, you know, grocery items. And I think the
Speaker 3: one of the interesting observations I've always had on this is, uh,
Speaker 3: back back to the sort of original like did we
Speaker 3: pick the right use case piece. We did a bunch
Speaker 3: of surveys sort of early on in the program of
Speaker 3: you know, what would you want delivered by drone if
Speaker 3: you if you had the option, and you know, there
Speaker 3: were dozens of different options sort of from food all
Speaker 3: the way to medicine, clothing, all these other things, and
Speaker 3: overwhelming the responses were always like, you know, drones should
Speaker 3: only be used for medical delivery, like they should only
Speaker 3: be used for medicine first aid bits like that. And
Speaker 3: then we went and offered the service in Australia. We
Speaker 3: had we had all those goods in there. We had
Speaker 3: like a lot of you know, like type of you know,
Speaker 3: over the counters, pharmacy items, sort of food, clothing, a
Speaker 3: bunch of different local restaurants, and like eighty percent of
Speaker 3: people ordered coffee. Like that was the overwhelming sort of
Speaker 3: thing because it's like that's something that people got every day,
Speaker 3: and it made.
Speaker 2: Sense stated preference versus revealed preference. I mean there is
Speaker 2: there is also the externality thing, right, Like it's one
Speaker 2: thing to say, if a drone's going to be flying
Speaker 2: over my house all the time, what do I want
Speaker 2: it to be delivering to everybody? Versus if it's coming
Speaker 2: to my house, what am I going to order today?
Speaker 3: Right? I mean that is another way to frame that's fair.
Speaker 2: So like what what are when you look back after
Speaker 2: ten years of working at it and like now you're
Speaker 2: actually doing it, Like, what are a few key things
Speaker 2: you figured out?
Speaker 3: I think one of the most defining moments is or
Speaker 3: maybe one of the most defining constraints. Most sort of
Speaker 3: disruptive or merging technologies sort of start off in a
Speaker 3: permissive environment. So you know, one of the one of
Speaker 3: the things that I you know, one of the questions
Speaker 3: I've gotten asked many times sort of over the years,
Speaker 3: is well, why didn't you take the approach that like
Speaker 3: ride share took of. Okay, you know, offer the service
Speaker 3: in a big metro area, build up a big customer base,
Speaker 3: and then as the rules change, you have, like you
Speaker 3: have customers to say, Okay, this is a valuable thing.
Speaker 2: Why didn't you do it?
Speaker 3: Why not just go? Why not why not just go?
Speaker 3: Do it? And I think at the core of it,
Speaker 3: it's because aviation does not operate that way right, Like
Speaker 3: aviation is is is built around a preempted set of
Speaker 3: rules where the federal government controls the airspace, so it's
Speaker 3: not up to sort of anyone given municipality. And from
Speaker 3: that place, you know, how do you build consumer demand,
Speaker 3: How do you show that this thing works? How do
Speaker 3: you even go and do a trial where the existing
Speaker 3: regulatory frameworks are just say no, you can't fly at all.
Speaker 2: Yes to Australia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's that's what That's what drove us to
Speaker 3: to start in Australia because they were one of the
Speaker 3: first markets where the National Aviation Regulator there they sort
Speaker 3: of quantify the risk of the operation. They look at
Speaker 3: the specifics the operation and they sort of approve on
Speaker 3: a case by case basis of all right, like this
Speaker 3: meets the same level of safety as an airliner, even
Speaker 3: though it's a very different use case.
Speaker 2: So just tell me like one thing that you know
Speaker 2: you had to figure out. Maybe you tried something and
Speaker 2: it didn't work, and you tried something else and it worked.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean? Is there just one kind
Speaker 2: of a microcosm example.
Speaker 3: If I could do two a lot? If that's yeah.
Speaker 3: So the first one is sort of how do you
Speaker 3: achieve aerospace reliability with like consumer electronics costs? So you know,
Speaker 3: we started from a place of how do you build
Speaker 3: these planes in a way where the unit economics will work?
Speaker 3: Not how do you build these planes and then try
Speaker 3: to figure out how to make the unit economics work?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: So what is I mean?
Speaker 2: Obviously the cost of one is going to be a
Speaker 2: function partly or largely of scale. But since you brought
Speaker 2: it up, like, what has one of them got a
Speaker 2: cost for it to work for you?
Speaker 3: I mean it has to look like cell phones basically.
Speaker 3: And I think that the interesting one that the sort
Speaker 3: of specific point here is is if you looked at
Speaker 3: just the reliability case Okay, so how many propulsion system
Speaker 3: elements do you need in order to be able to
Speaker 3: make the airplane sort of close all the reliability numbers.
Speaker 3: That requires eight motors in our use case, so you know,
Speaker 3: you need eight hover motors so that you can have
Speaker 3: any one of them fail at any given time and
Speaker 3: the airplane can still sort of have controlled flight. In
Speaker 3: our cost trades, it ended up being that if you
Speaker 3: move to twelve motors instead of eight motors, so the
Speaker 3: reliability numbers close at eight. But if you went to twelve,
Speaker 3: you got to use a much smaller motor that didn't
Speaker 3: need a carbon fiber propeller. You could use a plastic propeller.
Speaker 3: And there was a huge change in the cost of
Speaker 3: the total propulsion system by increasing the number of motors,
Speaker 3: which is not a thing that you would on the
Speaker 3: surface look at and be like, okay, this is intuitively obvious.
Speaker 2: So you're using twelve cheaper motors, so more smaller. It's
Speaker 2: more smaller motors rather than fewer larger motors. And I
Speaker 2: mean presumably you could keep going that way. You could
Speaker 2: have twenty tiny motors. I mean, you find the optimum.
Speaker 3: What settled on twelve was really driven by noise. So
Speaker 3: like as you get the burders smaller, they have the
Speaker 3: you know, the frequencies go higher, they spin faster, that
Speaker 3: discon goes up all these different effects. And so moving
Speaker 3: to twelve let you get the sort of cost benefits
Speaker 3: by going small motors. But you didn't sort of start
Speaker 3: climbing up that that noise curve by having like you know,
Speaker 3: like one hundred little half inch motors hu and even
Speaker 3: that there isn't an off the shelf propeller solution that
Speaker 3: sounds pleasant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that the sound, the sound is a big one, right,
Speaker 2: Like there was a good Wall Street Journal story I thought,
Speaker 2: uh from Australia where you were doing a lot of
Speaker 2: the early work, and the headline was delivery drones, cheer shoppers,
Speaker 2: annoy neighbors, scare dogs. Tell me about that piece of it.
Speaker 2: Tell me about the noise.
Speaker 3: So that's a that's a it's a thing you have
Speaker 3: to be conscious of. So, you know, we did a
Speaker 3: bunch of work early on in the development of this
Speaker 3: aircraft around sort of how do we how do we
Speaker 3: shape the tone of the noises being generated. So it's
Speaker 3: sort of less of like one big peak and sort
Speaker 3: of more broad spectrum, how do we reduce the noise
Speaker 3: of it? Like, if you look closely at our propellers,
Speaker 3: they're they're like asymmetrics. So there's one long set of
Speaker 3: blades and one short set of blades, and that creates
Speaker 3: like two tip forto sees that destructively interfere and like
Speaker 3: spread out noise. So all these things. So we did
Speaker 3: all this work on on the hover propulsion system, and
Speaker 3: the vast majority of of sort of noise feedback from
Speaker 3: the communities and mind you, like, if you compare this
Speaker 3: to the noise feedback you get about an actual airport
Speaker 3: or you know, construction project is still like far less
Speaker 3: than that. But it was all overflight, so it was
Speaker 3: like people weren't complaining about the airplanes hovering. They were
Speaker 3: complaining about them flying over overhead. And if you you
Speaker 3: look at the fact that the person that ordered the goods,
Speaker 3: like the plane is coming, then they asked for it, right,
Speaker 3: Like they're like they're like, I want the service. Their
Speaker 3: neighbors are probably also ordering things. But the thousand homes
Speaker 3: that you flew over to get to that spot, like
Speaker 3: may not be participating in the service.
Speaker 2: It's a negative externality, right, you're imposing a cost on
Speaker 2: someone who's not a party to the transaction.
Speaker 3: So so that was that was a very interesting learning
Speaker 3: sort of early on in our that we only would
Speaker 3: have learned by actually operating the service.
Speaker 2: Huh, it's that it's not it's not the next door
Speaker 2: neighbor who hates it. It's all the people between the
Speaker 2: store and the customer.
Speaker 3: And in that sense, it was like, okay, well, well,
Speaker 3: like we thought we needed to put all this development
Speaker 3: work in the hover propulsion system, but it's actually the
Speaker 3: crew system that they need to work.
Speaker 2: People never get mad about what you think they're going
Speaker 2: to get mad about, right again, I.
Speaker 3: Think that that's the at the core of it, Like
Speaker 3: the dron delivery space is like so full of has
Speaker 3: been so full of what ifs for so long, and
Speaker 3: in the absence of regulatory frameworks that let you go
Speaker 3: and operate like you can't move out these things that
Speaker 3: it it oftentimes like there's a lot of misconceptions about
Speaker 3: either noise or sort of what the use cases will
Speaker 3: be or what people want to order, and then when
Speaker 3: you go and offer the service, sort of the cure
Speaker 3: for the what ifs is the actuality of an operating.
Speaker 2: So okay, so you realize that the noise complaints aren't
Speaker 2: the noise complaints you're expecting. You had mitigated the one,
Speaker 2: the hovering, but not the other, the flying over. So
Speaker 2: now you have this new challenge, right that people getting
Speaker 2: mad if a drones are flying over their house all
Speaker 2: day long? What do you do about that?
Speaker 3: So we we basically did the same thing we did
Speaker 3: on the other propulsion side, So we used the same
Speaker 3: technology as to redesign the props. We sort of set
Speaker 3: the design target so that like basically the aircraft that
Speaker 3: the cruise altitude would be inaudible to a to an
Speaker 3: observer on the ground. But this is like everything in
Speaker 3: aerospace is a trade and so you know, for us,
Speaker 3: it was like we want to we want to address
Speaker 3: sort of any of the noise concerns. Uh, And so
Speaker 3: we're willing to go and do that development time and
Speaker 3: exercise and costs, redo the propulsions, and then redo the
Speaker 3: plane to to be able to use it. So that
Speaker 3: that's uh, that was that was one interesting one and
Speaker 3: the other one is just like you know, how you
Speaker 3: get the box to the people. So early on in
Speaker 3: the program, uh, we had basically you know, you have
Speaker 3: the little tope that hangs below the plane, and then
Speaker 3: it was connected to playing with a tether, and that
Speaker 3: tether went around a school and just sort of like
Speaker 3: you'd open up a latch and it would descend and
Speaker 3: you'd leave behind the string. So it was like the
Speaker 3: way of letting go the box was just well, there's
Speaker 3: only so much string on the on the on the aircraft.
Speaker 2: So so the customer would get a box with a
Speaker 2: long string.
Speaker 3: Not a great user experience, but very simple, like super simple.
Speaker 3: And uh, we spent a huge amount of time around
Speaker 3: how do you drop off the box without a bunch
Speaker 3: of mechanical complexity? So how do you how do you
Speaker 3: lower down the box, make sure that it lets go
Speaker 3: of the box one hundred percent of the time. Make
Speaker 3: sure that that little hook at the bottom doesn't get
Speaker 3: snagged on anything else as it's getting pulled back up. Uh.
Speaker 3: Making sure that that whole system could operate reliably, you know,
Speaker 3: thousands of times with dirt and leaves and stuff. Uh.
Speaker 3: And so like this is little, that little yellow bit
Speaker 3: of plastic. So you're just.
Speaker 2: Talking about the hook at the end of the line
Speaker 2: that holds the box. Like that is like a nightmare
Speaker 2: to get.
Speaker 3: Just right, nightmare to get just right. And it is
Speaker 3: probably one of the most iterated components on the whole aircraft.
Speaker 2: Still to come on the show. Why despite all that
Speaker 2: work on the hook and on everything else, drone delivery
Speaker 2: may never really take off. Also, what the world will
Speaker 2: look like if drone delivery does work? So what like
Speaker 2: what's the frontier for you? Like, what are you trying
Speaker 2: to figure out that you haven't figured out yet?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that for us right now. A couple
Speaker 3: of years ago in Australia when we were sort of
Speaker 3: ramping up volumes there, we demonstrated what scale looked like
Speaker 3: for a sort of confined geographic area. So, you know,
Speaker 3: one of the common I think misconceptions about drones is,
Speaker 3: you know, folks like, well, when drone delivery is real,
Speaker 3: I'll look up at the sky and all I see
Speaker 3: is drones. And I was like, well, no, when you
Speaker 3: when you actually do it, when you actually offer sort
Speaker 3: of the scaled out service to like a you know,
Speaker 3: one hundred square kilometer piece of the Earth, even when
Speaker 3: there's even then when there's a thousand deliveries happening in
Speaker 3: one day, and that that little space you can look
Speaker 3: up and not see any planes for a while. And
Speaker 3: so for the last couple of years that's what we
Speaker 3: were focused on was Okay, how do we demonstrate the
Speaker 3: unit scale of Okay, this is what drune delivery looks
Speaker 3: like at scale for one one small space. Now I
Speaker 3: think with the DFW expansion, we have the opportunity to
Speaker 3: do that at a whole sort of metro wide scale.
Speaker 3: So I think that the ability to offer the service
Speaker 3: across a big metro to like, you know, where you're
Speaker 3: gonna cover millions of people. Let's you answer, let's you
Speaker 3: sort of validate that those assumptions that have been proven
Speaker 3: out at smaller operational scales hold as you go up
Speaker 3: and so looking at things like how frequently do people order,
Speaker 3: like is it is it a novelty that people order
Speaker 3: once and then they're like, okay, well I got my
Speaker 3: cool TikTok video of a drown delivering me something or
Speaker 3: do they find value in it? You know, do you
Speaker 3: start to get to the place where you know, for us, like,
Speaker 3: you know, is one operator able to you know, do
Speaker 3: we have the permissions and is it working to have
Speaker 3: one operator do multiple locations and you know, many aircraft
Speaker 3: in the sky at once looking less and less like
Speaker 3: sort of a one to one relationship between sort of
Speaker 3: the person the operation to like more of a sort
Speaker 3: of dispatcher view of the world of like, okay, this
Speaker 3: person is managing a fleet of airplanes rather than energing
Speaker 3: sort of anyone flight.
Speaker 2: So in the in the current service as it exists, Now,
Speaker 2: what what is the role of human beings?
Speaker 3: It's it's really is like, uh, you know, a person
Speaker 3: has to put the stuff in the box. A person
Speaker 3: has to bring the box to where the plane is
Speaker 3: going to be, and you know, the plane hovers and
Speaker 3: lowers down the little hook and they hook the box
Speaker 3: on it and it takes it up. And then you know,
Speaker 3: somebody in the morning needs to take the planes and
Speaker 3: put them out on the pads, and at night take
Speaker 3: them and put them back in the shipping container. And
Speaker 3: then our pilots are sort of monitoring the operation.
Speaker 2: I mean, just to be clear, they're not flying the planes, right.
Speaker 2: The planes are flying themselves.
Speaker 3: Planes are the planes are flying themselves, but they're responsible
Speaker 3: for the operation, right. So like if if you look
Speaker 3: at the sort of like some of the core tenets
Speaker 3: of aviation, like the pilot is responsible for the airliner
Speaker 3: flight or for the charter flight. Like they're responsible for
Speaker 3: the operation. And so what does that mean when things
Speaker 3: get very highly automated, it's okay, well they're looking for
Speaker 3: other air traffic. They're looking for sort of is the
Speaker 3: system performing as we expect it to? Is there is
Speaker 3: there weather that's rolling in? Is there something else like that?
Speaker 2: So just so I can see, just so I can
Speaker 2: like visualize it, is there like at each place where
Speaker 2: you have a nest, like at each Walmart, is there
Speaker 2: like a room where there's a guy sitting or do
Speaker 2: you guys have like an office.
Speaker 3: There's an office where the folks are sitting.
Speaker 2: I mean you said there's a pilot, Like do they
Speaker 2: So what do they have like a little radar thing?
Speaker 3: Like pretty much like if you think about like sort
Speaker 3: of what what an aircraftic controller station would look like,
Speaker 3: or what a sort of train dispatcher station look like,
Speaker 3: that's more or less what the pilot interface looks like.
Speaker 3: So there is there's no live video feed from the aircraft.
Speaker 3: So like the airplanes sort of get their assigned flight
Speaker 3: when somebody places an order, because like we don't know
Speaker 3: where the next order is going to come from. So
Speaker 3: there's this whole route planning algorithm in the background that
Speaker 3: when somebody orders something, it's like, okay, I need to
Speaker 3: go fly this way, and here are the other flights
Speaker 3: in the space. They'll see those tracks like so they'll see, okay,
Speaker 3: I've got you know this many airplanes that are sort
Speaker 3: of active right now, I've got this many airplanes that
Speaker 3: are on the ground waiting getting assigned in order. And
Speaker 3: they're just little icons moving around the screen. So it's
Speaker 3: not like there's not some video feed. There's not like
Speaker 3: and then they've got like a view of the individual nests.
Speaker 3: So there's a little security camera looking down on it.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, okay, there's here all the airplanes, like
Speaker 3: you know, so it really is it is that sort
Speaker 3: of like supervisor interface. I think it's probably the easiest
Speaker 3: way to think about it, rather than like there's no
Speaker 3: like sort of controls and handles that people are manipulating
Speaker 3: to fly the planes around.
Speaker 2: I mean, is there like a button they can push
Speaker 2: if the plane needs to turn around or like whatever
Speaker 2: bail in some way?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a button. So one of the things they
Speaker 3: could do is they can pause the whole operation, so
Speaker 3: they can say like Okay, you know we're outside of
Speaker 3: our weather limits, or there's a airspace conflict that has
Speaker 3: gone through. Stop receiving orders.
Speaker 2: That's the easy one, don't any more planes out.
Speaker 3: The other one is they have a they have a
Speaker 3: button where they can tell the plane to land, and
Speaker 3: that's basically the plane is following like a four D trajectory,
Speaker 3: so it's got a like a three D path plus
Speaker 3: time where it's like, Okay, I'm supposed to be in
Speaker 3: this airspace at this time, and it'll it'll keep flying
Speaker 3: on that path until it gets to a place that
Speaker 3: sort of has been procedurally generated as like okay to land,
Speaker 3: so like you know, open fields and like trees and
Speaker 3: stuff like, not roads, not like sidewalks, and so the
Speaker 3: plane will keep flying until it gets to one of
Speaker 3: those places and it'll sort of slow down to a hover,
Speaker 3: come down, and land and that those are really the
Speaker 3: those are the two commands.
Speaker 2: How often does that one happen?
Speaker 3: Very land, Yeah, very infrequently. And I think it's more
Speaker 3: I think it's more akin to like like if you
Speaker 3: pulled your car over to the side of the road
Speaker 3: with a check engine light it's it's not like it's
Speaker 3: not like sort of anything is like fundamentally broken. It's
Speaker 3: more like a precautionary step. And I think that's that's
Speaker 3: one of the pieces that sort of underpins this whole
Speaker 3: sort of operational cases, like all these layers of redundancy.
Speaker 3: The plane can either the plane can go to the
Speaker 3: delivery zone and say like, well, I don't think I
Speaker 3: should deliver the package because there's an obstacle and they'll
Speaker 3: come back. The plane can go and deliver the box
Speaker 3: and say I delivered it, but I had to move
Speaker 3: two meters over because there was an obstacle, like disable
Speaker 3: this delivery zone. The plane can come back and say, hey,
Speaker 3: I was doing that, and when I was on my
Speaker 3: way back, I noticed that I was using slightly more
Speaker 3: power than I usually use, like I'm gonna ground myself.
Speaker 3: And sort of there's all these layers, and one of
Speaker 3: those layers is the plane or the pilot can say, hey, like,
Speaker 3: why don't you pull over the side of the road
Speaker 3: so we can we could check on you.
Speaker 2: Uh is there a camera on the plane?
Speaker 3: Yeah, surely.
Speaker 2: Something many people ask you, like, is the drone looking
Speaker 2: at me?
Speaker 3: So the drone is not looking at you. Again, I
Speaker 3: think it's like there's no uh, there's no live feed,
Speaker 3: so it's not like there's like an operator sort of
Speaker 3: interfacing that video. But the aircraft has two sets of
Speaker 3: stereo cameras on the back of it that are used
Speaker 3: for uh so both visual odometry so like a backup
Speaker 3: to GPS, and for like sort of broad scene understanding,
Speaker 3: so like building a depth map of sort of what
Speaker 3: you're flying over. But those are all like that's a
Speaker 3: point cloud, that's not like images of stuff. You know.
Speaker 3: One of the biggest challenges of like residential drone delivery
Speaker 3: is like you're going to you're going from a very
Speaker 3: structured environment to a very unstructured environment. So like like
Speaker 3: the sky is like usually it's very clear, clear of obstacles.
Speaker 3: Somebody's backyard like may not be clear obstacles. There may
Speaker 3: be there may be a tree branch that has grown
Speaker 3: sort of since the last time that sort of satellite
Speaker 3: imagery was refreshed. And so the cameras on board the
Speaker 3: aircraft are used mostly for the reason they're used for
Speaker 3: navigation and for sort of obstacle detection. They run what's
Speaker 3: what are what's called like a bunch of semantic modeling.
Speaker 3: So like if you think about like a toddler putting
Speaker 3: blocks into the little toy, they'll be like triangle goes
Speaker 3: in triangle, circle goes in circle. The plane is like car, tree, house, road, huh.
Speaker 2: Like computer vision, like basic computer visions, computer vision stuff.
Speaker 2: So that one is interesting in that I feel like
Speaker 2: when you started that wasn't nearly as good.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, you can do We could do a lot
Speaker 3: more now than then we could at the beginning of
Speaker 3: the program. And like you know, we we can run
Speaker 3: like live classification on like you know, cell phone like
Speaker 3: avion X.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, does does it also do that to
Speaker 2: say like, oh, don't lower the box. There's the dog
Speaker 2: running around the.
Speaker 3: Yard yep, yep, so'll it'll do that. And it'll do
Speaker 3: basically what's what's called delivery zone nudging, so like a
Speaker 3: spot is picked sort of before the plane gets there
Speaker 3: where to lower the box. If the plane is coming down,
Speaker 3: it says, well, where you told me to lower the box.
Speaker 3: There's a car or the tree branch is bigger than
Speaker 3: what you said it was. It can, within a bounded
Speaker 3: set of decisions sort of move it a certain distance
Speaker 3: to drop off the box and then it will tell
Speaker 3: us like, hey, I had a move where the delivery
Speaker 3: zone was.
Speaker 2: How often how often does a delivery fail? Like does
Speaker 2: it get there and it's like, no, this isn't going
Speaker 2: to work. I got to get out here pretty infrequently.
Speaker 2: I mean, like one, it's in the hundreds or thousands. Okay,
Speaker 2: So so big picture, if things go well for drone delivery,
Speaker 2: what will the world look like in say five or
Speaker 2: ten years.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think at the core of it, if if
Speaker 3: this experiment works right, like if if drne delivery takes off,
Speaker 3: it will be the like primary means that people get
Speaker 3: small goods delivered, So I think that it will be
Speaker 3: it'll be everyday occurrence for the same folks that order
Speaker 3: food every day today. Most of that will be coming
Speaker 3: with airplanes. Because think it just just makes more sense.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: What's the version of the future where it doesn't work? Like,
Speaker 2: what are the reasons it might not work?
Speaker 3: I think some of it is if people can actually
Speaker 3: get past the what ifs, like you know, do people
Speaker 3: order frequently enough? Is it a good experience for the partners?
Speaker 3: Like are you integrating well enough into their workflow? Where
Speaker 3: Joon delivery is an asset, not a burden to their
Speaker 3: sort of the day in the life of their associates.
Speaker 3: Are all the companies in the space still around right?
Speaker 3: Like this is like these are really long timelines in
Speaker 3: a challenging funding environment.
Speaker 2: So like, you know, it's really expensive to get to
Speaker 2: a point where the business makes sense to get to scale.
Speaker 3: And then I think I worry sometimes that that folks
Speaker 3: will sty'll sort of chase the long tail of the
Speaker 3: sort of use case. So you know, drones don't have
Speaker 3: to deliver everything, right, and so I worry about sort
Speaker 3: of a lack of focus of like okay, like you know,
Speaker 3: here's a place where drones make a ton of sense
Speaker 3: to deliver stuff. Let's be really successful there rather than like, oh,
Speaker 3: they might be able to deliver you know, the case
Speaker 3: of bowling balls, Like yeah, they might be able to,
Speaker 3: but advan is a much better use case for that.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 2: So I just want to do a lightning round. I
Speaker 2: appreciate your time. I want to talk about I want
Speaker 2: to talk about your Instagram, Like it's it's stuff like
Speaker 2: I'm looking and like here's like it's a lot of
Speaker 2: Star Wars, like planes like X wing Fighter, and there's
Speaker 2: the X wing Fighter and it's it's actually flying right
Speaker 2: you click on it. And there's the like winged win
Speaker 2: a Bago from space Balls. There's the flying toaster, which
Speaker 2: is like a cut from the it's like the ninety
Speaker 2: screen saver, right, and like so you take these things
Speaker 2: and you actually make.
Speaker 3: Them fly by. So not surprisingly, I'm a bit of
Speaker 3: a nerd, like I like star Wars and sci fi things.
Speaker 3: I always have, and I reached a point where sort
Speaker 3: of both the intersection of technologies and my skill at
Speaker 3: designing airplanes were such that I could make the toys
Speaker 3: that I had as a can work as like real things.
Speaker 2: Right, So you take the like plastic X wing fighter
Speaker 2: that I had in my room, and like I made
Speaker 2: it fly by like throwing it in my hand and
Speaker 2: making the sounds right, and you actually make it fly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's it's It's also like how I sort
Speaker 3: of continuously sharpened my skills as an engineer. So like
Speaker 3: often they're like really hard airplane design problems of like
Speaker 3: what are the aerodynamics of an X wing?
Speaker 2: So let me ask you on that note, let me
Speaker 2: ask you, like is there a specific thing you learned
Speaker 2: in building these models that you brought to your work
Speaker 2: at Wing.
Speaker 3: I think I've brought a similar philosophy, which is like,
Speaker 3: how do you how do you get to a complex
Speaker 3: result without a complex solution? Where it's like, okay, how
Speaker 3: do I how do I get that same joy? How
Speaker 3: do I get to that same result with a simpler answer? So, uh,
Speaker 3: that's I think that that's that's how I approach my
Speaker 3: professional life as well.
Speaker 2: You got a white whale. Is there something you want
Speaker 2: to build that flies that you haven't been able to do?
Speaker 3: I have always wanted to do a tie interceptor. This
Speaker 3: is always my favorite star warship. But there's like not
Speaker 3: much in the way of wing on that.
Speaker 2: Who flew that?
Speaker 3: Was that?
Speaker 2: The the good guys? Okay, right, so it's like what
Speaker 2: the storm Troopers flew? Sort of a variation on that.
Speaker 2: You built one of those that goes in the water
Speaker 2: some some version of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I saw that.
Speaker 2: I was like, does that fly? And then I saw
Speaker 2: that it was in the.
Speaker 3: Like every probably every four years, I get in the
Speaker 3: submarines and I'll like build some submarine stuff and then
Speaker 3: I'll put it on the shelf.
Speaker 2: So I feel like I'm I'm moving on from what
Speaker 2: you built now. Just to be clear, the I feel
Speaker 2: like the word drone is is not doing drones any favors, right,
Speaker 2: I feel like it has a lot of negative notations.
Speaker 2: There's like a militaristic connotation. There's the connotation of like
Speaker 2: a worker who is unfeeling and doesn't do anything. Is
Speaker 2: there a word that you think would be better?
Speaker 3: I mean at this point, I think that that that
Speaker 3: ship is long since sailed in his left board. I mean,
Speaker 3: there was like a there's been a South Park episode
Speaker 3: about it, Like I don't think that like like uh so,
Speaker 3: I don't know. I think it's it's a word. I
Speaker 3: don't think you should ever be afraid of of of
Speaker 3: the word. And at the core of it, like I
Speaker 3: don't know, I think of them all as airplanes, Like
Speaker 3: they fly around with other airplanes, like they need to
Speaker 3: do airplane stuff. And I think that like part of
Speaker 3: the reason that the skepticism that that you brought up
Speaker 3: earlier exists is the sort of the gap between the
Speaker 3: sort of promise and the reality. And so you know,
Speaker 3: the the sooner that we can get these services sort
Speaker 3: of real and live and interacting with more people. I
Speaker 3: think that people will just look at these as tools
Speaker 3: that are flying around providing a service. And my I've
Speaker 3: always I tell the team frequently, I like, I want
Speaker 3: people to look at the plane and think of it
Speaker 3: like a shopping cart, and it's just like it's a
Speaker 3: thing that's very useful. People use them all the time,
Speaker 3: but you don't really give it a second thought, and
Speaker 3: it's just that it's an asset that you use.
Speaker 2: Adam Woodworth is the CEO of Wing. Today's show was
Speaker 2: produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lydia
Speaker 2: Jean Kott and engineered.
Speaker 3: By Sarah Bruguer.
Speaker 2: Please email us we are at problem at pushkin dot fm.
Speaker 2: Let us know would interview on the show, how to
Speaker 2: make the show better, et cetera. I'm Jacob Boldstein and
Speaker 2: we'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Speaker 2: Your Problem