Droid Fuselage
Zipline, Platform 2
AERIAL DELIVERY VEHICLE SYSTEM (P308478.US.01)
The Droid, or Active Package, is the delivery vehicle for Zipline’s Platform 2. It is winched down from the mothership and precision-controlled by fans to deliver packages to suburban doorsteps.
I led Droid fuselage development from initial concepting through defining prototype iterations. When I joined the team, I had the ideal OML from Industrial Design and a list of components that needed to fit inside; in six months we had a test-ready fuselage buck with many subcomponents swirling in parallel.
D E S I G N
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Fuselage mounts all Droid subsystems, requiring collaborative relationships with subcomponent teams: door mech, aero-acoustics, battery/powertrain, avionics, camera, latch mech, paraland assemblies
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Adjusting designs as we learned about new performance baselines, customer needs, and evolving go-to-market strategy.
For example: Initial OML did not account for aeroacoustics, material minimum wall thicknesses, or propeller clearances
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Learning as fast as possible requires constant builds. I was able to gain confidence in production intent using prototype materials and manufacturing methods, at times very scrappily.
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I love to cut up requirements and get everyone sketching. MS Paint, Procreate, pen & paper, whiteboarding, what are our nice to haves and what do we need? Let’s dive into this repackaging sprint as a team.
S C A L I N G U P
From first pass component design, I’m thinking about how I could build it by the end of the week and how I can scale it. I’ve learned something from every prototype build, and oftentimes not what I was expecting. Droid really drove this home for value proposition!
I collaborated with new product introduction, supply chain, supplier industrialization, and dimensional engineering teams internally, as well as numerous external vendors to work towards developing high-quality and affordable parts at scale. I directed development of prototype tools and jigs internally in parallel with high-volume systems at our vendors’.
I memorized data sheets across moldable polymers, expanded foams, and composite systems so I could calculate tradeoffs on the fly, comparing idealized designs to prototypes in stiffness, strength, and mass. Mass sensitivity required me to push limits while simultaneously getting familiar with new (to me) manufacturing methods.
