The drone delivery startup Matternet is getting ready to put its technology into commercial use. The company has announced that it will soon be launching a drone delivery network in urban areas of Switzerland to ferry medical samples between labs and hospitals. The company has also announced the Matternet Station, which is an answer to one of the big questions facing drone delivery companies: how to handle the beginning and end of a trip.

Matternet is taking a different approach than Amazon, which envisions drones dropping packages off in a customer's yard. This is an approach that could work well in suburban and rural areas but won't work as well in big cities where people might not have suitable places for package drop-offs.

The Matternet station works like a drone mailbox. Customers insert a package into a slot in the station, and a robot arm hands the package off to a Matternet drone for takeoff. If the customer arrives at the drop-off station before the drone, the station can hold the package until the drone gets there. The drone then flies to another Matternet station, which stores the package until the recipient arrives to pick it up.

I got to see this technology in action when I visited Matternet's Silicon Valley headquarters back in June. And I talked to Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos, who painted a vision of a future with hundreds of Matternet stations on street corners and rooftops across a metropolitan area. In a decade or two, Matternet stations could be as plentiful as mailboxes are today, and you'll be able to walk to the nearest one, drop your package off, and have it reach another Matternet station near your recipient in another part of your metropolitan area within half an hour.

A big benefit of using this kind of station will be to enable drone deliveries to be fully automated. Amazon's model requires drones to be loaded up at an Amazon warehouse staffed by human operators. That works fine for big companies like Amazon sending out thousands of packages every day. But it may not be feasible for small businesses and individuals that want to send packages.

So how soon will you be able to actually use Matternet's network? The company is launching its first operational trial this year in Switzerland, ferrying medical samples between hospitals. It's a promising market for Matternet, because medical samples are time-critical, and hospitals currently send them around using expensive couriers. In June, Raptopoulos told me that he expects these deliveries to cost between $5 and $10, compared to a cost around $30 for a conventional courier.

And Raptopoulos expects those costs to fall significantly. "When you increase the density of your networks, then there is a pathway to get the cost below $2" per delivery, he said. Eventually, he believes, a 30-minute crosstown delivery could cost as little as $1.

Raptopoulos said that regulations are a major barrier to building a drone delivery network here in the United States. Federal Aviation Administration regulations written for an era of manned flight need to be updated to allow fully autonomous drone flights.

"In the US, we cannot run the operations that we're running in Switzerland today," Raptopoulos told me in June. "You need two things. You need to be able to operate beyond the line of sight of a human pilot or observer. And we need to be able to fly over people. The FAA is not permitting these yet."

I also asked Raptopoulos about the obvious safety concern: what happens if the drone malfunctions over a populated area. Matternet's approach to this is to have a parachute built into every drone. If it detects a malfunction, it cuts power to the motors and deploys the parachute, allowing it to float to the ground slowly enough that no one should get hurt.

Listing image by Matternet