We’re joined by Zipline cofounder / CTO, Keenan Wyrobek. Zipline is on a mission to build the world’s first logistics system that serves all people equally via their fleet of autonomous drones that started in Africa delivering medical supplies and can now deliver packages (up to 8 lbs) directly to your door. They’ve solved a lot of gnarly technical and regulatory challenges along the way. We go deep with Keenan. We hope you’ll find this one fascinating.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.
Framer – Design and publish in one place. Get started free at framer.com/design, code CHANGELOG for a free month of Pro.
Featuring:
Keenan Wyrobek – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Zipline drone delivery & logistics
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The 1980s promised robotic servants were in reach. They’d clean up our houses. Bring us drinks. Usher in an era of leisure. We didn’t get robot butlers. But if we look around, we’ll find an army of robotic servants already automating away domestic drudgery.
Richard Rowland recounts the extent to which Androbot over-promised on its ability to build a robot servant. 40 years later, we still don’t have robot maids. Monroe Kennedy III walks us through the complexities of seemingly simple tasks. To make things more difficult, each attempt to build a robot had to build the hardware AND write the code from scratch. Keenan Wyrobek explains that’s why he helped write and share the Robot Operating System (ROS). Leila Takayama describes how beneficial ROS was to the field of robotics. And Terry Fong shares how NASA is using ROS to build the robots that explore our solar system.
If you want to read up on some of our research on domestic robots, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.
Follow along with the episode transcript.
In episode six of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter is joined by Keenan Wyrobek, co-founder and head of product and engineering at Zipline. Founded in 2014, Zipline is an on-demand drone delivery service using cutting-edge drone engineering and AI to deliver urgent medical products. In our chat Keenan talks about his youth tearing down his school's 3D printers, how U2's Bono joined his company's board of directors and working with NASA to help his drones fly through extreme weather. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.