CHICAGO · MATTERNET Q&A · ARTURO PELAYO #5911 APRIL 2012
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A PATH TO A ROADLESS WORLD
Arturo Pelayo, PLATOON member #5911 and founder of ARIA, is working towards the development of a new roadless transport system, which will be a revolution in logistics and will provide a more democratic way to gain equal access to isolated regions all around the world. Arturo along with an international team have come up with a concept called Matternet.
they have met at NASA Ames Research Park in California, where they developed the idea together at Singularity University which is hosted inside the Research Park. beside ARIA and Matternet, Arturo founded also Ocean University, a cruising academy for thinkers, designers and entrepreneurs where the goal is to bring principles of Design aboard the ship and engage in week-long projects.
read PLATOON‘s report about Matternet and the Q&A with Arturo below.
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A PATH TO A ROADLESS WORLD Q: could we really live in a roadless world? A: yes. a roadless world has the potential to revolutionize how we even develop in our social networks. overtime battery technology will improve and this will allow for heavier payload and longer distances at shorter delivery times.
it is not out of sight to have applications for personal transport, emergency response, building construction using heavy payload vehicles instead of cranes for example.
it would lend to smarter cities, less sprawl and a potential for better agricultural practices. right now, over 70% of the profits for a farmer’s crop are consumed in transport to a local market to sell and distribute his/her crop. with a technology like this, the farmer can directly send the crop to his end customers with a wireless, roadless autonomous logistics infrastructure that can handle monetary transactions through his cellphone. his path to market increases exponentially and it also means he can access that costumer even if the seasonal roads have washed away, since he is using aerial vehicles. it is even more paramount for mountainous regions where the vertical advantage of using this vehicles becomes even more evident.
Q: at which stage is the project at the moment?
A: ARIA embraces open source technology and we see the DIY/Maker movement as the force to make this vehicles happen.
we will create incentives for the community to angle their passion with this vision of accelerating economic activity in remote areas of the world. we will also continue developing the technologies that will be at the backbone of the vision making exchanges transparent from point to point, just like current logistics delivery companies do. for the end costumer, he/she only cares about getting the package safely on time from point A to point B.
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A PATH TO A ROADLESS WORLD we are also working closely in interoperability so that you can send a package perhaps from a traditional service in a urban area to a rural area where the end customer receives the package via the Matternet vehicles that are developed with open source hardware, thus accelerating their reliability and lowering costs dramatically.
Q: tell us more about the containers, which you also want to use.
we believe that the basic infrastructure building blocks are, literally, containers. they provide a universal footprint where renewable energy technologies can be incorporated to create the battery recharging and re-routing stations. we see immediately the potentials for these stations to also become micro-grids and provide other services, thus creating shorter, faster, better paths to market for any applications to run on the Matternet.
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