4.5.23-AI-AdaViv

LARS ERIK: Hello, my name is Lars Erik. I'm the CEO of Aviant. So Aviant was started at MIT in 2020 by three graduate students with the purpose of doing autonomous last mile logistics. We currently are one out of two European companies that have a live service for autonomous last mile logistics. Now what does this mean? It means that you can go to Trondheim, download the app, make a purchase, and it will be flown to your backyard with an autonomous drone. Now why is this important? Now I'm a big nerd. I love the idea of an autonomous highway of goods being delivered to my doorstep. But it doesn't matter if it doesn't solve a real problem.

So the problem with current last mile logistics, first of all, it's costs. 80% of the cost is directed to labor. Second is efficiency-- you have traffic, you have traffic lights, you have a ordering which is highly infrequent with very high maximums, which is difficult to hire for. And lastly, it's unsustainable. So these sectors in the US with the highest amount of emissions is logistics and transportation, and it's similar in most European countries.

Now drones address these three problems. First of all, we automate the highest cost contributor. Secondly, you can have a fleet of drones, you don't pay any price per hour, and they fly above traffic. And thirdly, they're much more sustainable, where a drone uses 95% less CO2 emissions than an electric car. So how do we do this? So we have a marketplace called Kites, which you can download from the app store, where suppliers can sign on to have their goods distributed autonomously. You have customers that sign onto to have the good delivered to them directly.

And we do this by first building the customized drone for this purpose. There is no drone on the market you can just buy to do this. We tried to find it. So we had to build a drone from scratch for this purpose. Secondly, we build the customer facing applications-- so the app for the suppliers and for the customers. But most importantly, we build the infrastructure around. So that's autonomous route planning, that's certification, it's tracking of all the drones. We've done more than 40,000 kilometers flown. So we track all of this, making sure it's safe. And we also make sure that we have the regulatory approvals to do the operations that we do.

So this is my favorite slide. Here you can see the drone in beautiful Norway. It takes a vertically transition to forward flight using the wings, and then when it's getting ready to do a delivery, it winches the good down with a winch. Now this is done in -20 Celsius with winds up to 20 knots-- or 10 second meters per second-- so very extreme conditions. Now I see what some of you are thinking. Lars, why do you have wings? Why don't you just do a traditional quadcopter? Much easier, get to the market faster. Well the reason is range. Because of the area you can cover of a circle, it scales quadratically with the radius.

So when we can cover 10 kilometer, and a competitor can cover 1 kilometer, they would need 100 bases to cover the same area that we do. And because of the economics of a base, it doesn't cost us a lot of money to send off the drone. What costs money is to operate the base. So the volume of a base is detrimental to the economics of it. Now in practice, here you can see our facilities in Trondheim. It's huge. There's no such area like this in Europe that you can fly autonomously with last mile currently. It's-- from the middle out to the end it's 30 kilometers, or 18 miles.

So now you know if you go to Trondheim, green areas-- that's where you should go. That's where you can get the deliveries. We are expanding. So we operate in Norway, we operate in Sweden, we will operate in Europe this year. We have European approvals. Now we are looking into expanding into the US. So we're looking for partners within retail, within pharmaceuticals, we even look for-- we have some implementation with industry. So we fly spare parts to windmill farms. But then we don't fly sushi, we fly chips or electronics. So if you have a need for autonomous logistics or curious about drones, come to me or Herman afterwards. Thanks so much.