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**Adam Stacoviak:** And to what level your advancements may be well beyond that, to truly say what you said. Because I'm sure there's a lot of people who say "You know, Keenan, I hear you saying that, but I still don't believe it..." Because they can't believe it until they see the truth of the superhuman ability to fl... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. It is surreal to see these things handle the -- when I saw the first... I mean, all this fault tolerance we test extensively. \[unintelligible 01:19:51.18\] one rotor fails, and the system handles it, and goes back and docks. When that is working well, when you're watching it happen, if you do... |
This is one of the exciting things about autonomous systems, is they can get super-robust, which means we can operate and serve customers and deliver to patients and hospitals in all kinds of really crazy conditions. Again, the conditions that -- you know, flying low altitude in these storms, nobody does it. And when I... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I used to listen to the Bill Burr podcast quite a bit; I don't anymore, but he is a hobbyist, but a trained helicopter pilot. And so he would chronicle some of his -- it's just him talking for an hour, so he needs a funny person to listen \[unintelligible 01:21:32.00\] so it's enjoyable. But he w... |
\[01:21:52.03\] It's so fraught and dangerous to fly helicopters in adverse conditions... I mean, it's a death knell. And we know that we've had famous people like Kobe Bryant dying in helicopter crashes, just because of fog, or because of bad systems. And humans struggle, and have to have extreme training to be able t... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, absolutely. And what our system can do literally in the blink of a human eye is the tech side handle almost everything that can go wrong, but faster than a human blinks. And that's powerful for making autonomy scalable and safe. |
**Jerod Santo:** One last question for you, Keenan - what's your tech stack? So if you were to describe -- I know you have lots of different tech... If you were to pull out all the tools in your CTO tool belt - programming languages, frameworks... What's Zipline built on? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Right. Yeah, I mean, for high-performance stuff in the cloud we go for -- almost everything on the aircraft is moving to Rust. There's various parts of the tech stack... Almost every part of the tech stack kind of has its own little world. A lot of -- we've built our own in-house simulation system w... |
Yeah, we use open source where we can; of course, we contribute to open source where we can. I'm a big proponent of open source. One of the things we actually did on the tech stack, what we spent a lot of time on, is basically the future of autonomous flight. Even today in Dallas we share the airspace with some of thes... |
So Zipline's working on a bunch of projects like that, that we have or intend to make open to the community, so we can kind of prove it internally as like "Hey, this is how our drones don't collide at scale with each other", and make those technologies available so everybody can share that. That's a big part of the tec... |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you see a world where there's some sort of open orchestration communication channel where you're not just detecting objects and avoiding them, but maybe you're actually publishing your future path, and so other systems can know, like, "There's zips going this way and that, and so I can avoid those p... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, absolutely. So today there's a version of that that we use in Dallas. And it's not live, it's done before you take off. Basically, there's a federated cloud-based system where the different operators' systems talk to each other. And basically, it's very rudimentary today. You can kind of think... |
\[01:26:13.12\] Internally, our aircrafts share information live with each other over a point-to-point radio link, where they share their intent of "Where I'm going in the next 10 seconds" or so. And they do that also over the IP network. I can't announce the partner yet, but there's a commercial drone operator in Dall... |
So yeah, I think what you're describing is going to be the beginning of where we go with this. I think there's going to end up being a fair bit of structure, a lot of real-time sharing to make sure we use the airspace really efficiently, and scalably. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like a DNS in the cloud, basically; in the sky, literally the clouds... Pluralized, not the internet cloud as we know it. But it's kind of like that; it's like a phone system, in a way, or a route system, or a flight path you now have to have predefined or known things. It's like "Well, we have... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, but constantly changing. Yeah. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Exactly. Yeah, we spent a lot of time talking to the original folks who created ICANN, which created the DNS system, to like "How did that actually come to be?" Because in some ways it's kind of a miracle, how open the internet is, and how it evolves... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Undoubtedly, yeah. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** And it's like "Alright, cool. We want to learn all the lessons from that", because we really want the future of the airspace to be similarly democratized and open and innovative and evolving. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. So you're studying DNS to learn how to do things in the sky? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Absolutely. Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** And not just the technical layer of DNS, but also like -- if you've heard of ICANN, the international... It's a corporation of names and numbers, I think. Anyway, it's basically the people behind sort of the internet, that agree internationally of how it's going to work. They figured out how to be a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So when you operate on a 2D plane, everybody gets one place. So like my house address leads to one place. Now, there's many paths to that place, so you can alternate routes, and that's all well and good. But on a 3D plane, if you have conflicting paths, how feasible is it to just change the Z ax... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[01:29:03.02\] No, that's exactly how our drones don't hit each other. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So they're just like "Well, I'll go up or down a little bit." |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Exactly. There's a distributed algorithm, they share their 10 seconds out intent with each other, and there's a distributed algorithm based on what they hear from the people around them, that they'll adjust their course in a way where you get an emergent behavior you're talking about, of like "Okay,... |
**Jerod Santo:** When you bring up layers, it makes me think "Is there an advantage in formalizing around some kind of layering, vertical layering of lanes, so to speak?" ...so you're not just having the emergent behavior of height, but you're actually pre-planning like "Well, I fly at this altitude, and this other com... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** I think that'll happen. And I think it'll be more than vertical. I think it'll be more like sort of highways or lanes. And the reason -- there's a lot of things we do to optimize for safety, but one thing you'll do is you'll avoid certain areas. The classic example is a stadium. If there's a game ha... |
**Jerod Santo:** It'd be great advertising \[unintelligible 01:30:51.08\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Not a crash, just a parachute." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Not a crash. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. Exactly. So everybody in the air is avoiding similar things, and so you'll end up with this congestion, kind of going around these keepouts, or these soft keepouts, as we call them... And sometimes hard keep outs. So there's certain government places where the government is like "You cannot fl... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's so cool. So cool. Well, we've taken enough of your time... We appreciate you answering all of our questions. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So much fun. |
**Jerod Santo:** I think this is one of the coolest things there is. I'm both happy with you, and jealous of you that you get to work on Zipline all the time, because I just feel like there's so many hard problems, there's so much benefit on the other side of it... And so congrats, and good luck, I guess, on scaling ou... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Thank you. It's a fun place to work. Just yesterday I came to work a bit earlier, I was on a call in my car, and I was watching everybody walk into the office and everybody kind of has like a skip in their step... And I was just like -- anyway, just reminding myself how lucky I am to work in a place... |
**Jerod Santo:** For sure. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. Great to talk with both of you, too. I really enjoyed this conversation. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It was awesome. |
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