Y Combinator

My name is Arturo Pelayo, I am co-founder of ARIA (Autonomous Roadless Intelligent Array, on the web here: www.Aria-Logistics.com). I want to explain that we have been working with ReAllocate in this project since June (http://aria-logistics.com/reallocate-collaboration/).

ARIA is an open source autonomous logistics infrastructure that leapfrogs traditional road infrastructure and unlocks economic opportunity.

While the IndieGoGo video might appear to be disconnected, there is a flow to all of them because we have been building them for over a year both ARIA on its own by using open source UAVs and ReAllocate by trying to solve 'the last mile' problem by building in-country capacity using retrofitted shipping containers.

Back in June, both ARIA and ReAllocate saw an alignment as ReAllocate wanted to do a drone project for Burning Man. Between both groups, we drafted an open call through Chris Anderson's DIY Drones Community and ARIA also began the process of creating awareness of this collaboration on the website.

ARIA also sought out media coverage through contacts at Wired, Fast Company and other publications. Fast Company published an article about it over a week ago and you can read it here:

http://fastcoexist.com/1680223/a-real-internet-of-things-for...

You will see that the Fast Company article above focuses on ARIA as a company that began last Summer when four of ARIA's cofounders met at Singularity University for the 11-week Graduate Studies Program. During that time worked on 'Matternet': a network of autonomous vehicles that could be used to deliver high-value goods to remote regions of the world with no roads.

The Graduate Studies Program focuses on teaching technologies that are changing very quickly, are dropping in cost, are following Moore's Law and that are being integrated into the mainstream (these are called 'exponential technologies').

The comments so far in Y Combinator refer to a lot of "disconnected ideas". 3D printing is expensive at the moment but we believe it will become so cheap in the next decade that it will become obliquitous to the point that farmers in remote areas of the planet could request from their cellphones replacement parts for a broken tractor just by taking a picture of the broken part and an Artificial Intelligence component would analyze the image, determine what is broken and send to a 3D printer in a shipping container a request for it to be printed, billed to the customer and sent to their dynamic GPS location on their cellphone (sound familiar??) -- this is where the analog was realized and we joined efforts to build the project together.

Shipping containers are being considered also by ARIA since last year when the concept was first conceived as they are very easily found worldwide and are extremely cheap. There are over 600 million containers being used each year for the global transport of raw materials and products across the planet, ARIA saw shipping containers as the building block of a standardized structure that could be used as a ground station to host vehicles and recharge batteries. Because these containers would be located in areas of no roads, they would have to use renewable energy sources to charge batteries that power the UAVs that fly in a 10Km radius.

The network of shipping containers thus becomes also a distributed micro-grid that is smart and that can route packages from one station to another. Think of it as The Pony Express 2.0 .

As you can see, there are many ideas being put together and we are working hard at this at ARIA.