ZYML Humanitarian Drone Project

The problem → the mission

Entire communities wait days for medicine that travels 15 km

Across rural Colombia and Latin America, unreliable road infrastructure keeps vaccines, antibiotics, and emergency supplies out of reach — sometimes for weeks. Helicopters and manned aircraft exist, but their operating costs make them unsustainable for daily community health.

Last-mile failure: the medicine exists at regional centers — the road to the patient doesn't.
Cost barrier: conventional air logistics cost orders of magnitude more per delivery.
Dependency trap: imported solutions leave when the funding does. Local manufacturing stays.

Our answer: a delivery drone cheap enough to operate daily, open enough to be repaired anywhere, and simple enough to be built by the community it serves.

Map of autonomous delivery corridors from a regional health center to isolated communities — FIG. 01 — DELIVERY NETWORK CONCEPT · CARIBBEAN COLOMBIA

Operation cycle

From health center to doorstep — no pilot, no roads

Each delivery is a fully autonomous mission: loaded by health workers, flown by the onboard computer, and monitored remotely over LTE and LoRa.

Medical cargo loaded at a regional health center

STEP 01

Load & dispatch

Health workers place vaccines or medication in the temperature-aware cargo bay and select the destination. No piloting skills required.

Drone flying autonomously over mountains guided by GPS waypoints

STEP 02

Autonomous flight

The drone follows pre-surveyed corridors using RTK GPS, supervised in real time over LTE/4G with LoRa and ELRS radio backup beyond coverage.

Drone lowering a medical package onto a precision landing target in a village

STEP 03

Precision delivery

Centimeter-accurate landing on a marked point at the community. If the link is ever lost, the aircraft holds or lands safely on its own.

Technical blueprint of the ZYML-1 cargo drone, top view with annotated components — FIG. 02 — ZYML-1 AIRFRAME · OPEN HARDWARE BLUEPRINT

Engineering

Serious autonomy, radically low cost

The airframe is 3D-printed and CNC-cut so any workshop can replicate it. The intelligence comes from proven open-source flight software, hardened with our own navigation stack.

Flight stackPixhawk flight controller running PX4 + Raspberry Pi 5 companion computer (OFFBOARD control)

Outdoor navigationRTK GPS with centimeter-level precision for waypoints and landing

GPS-denied navigationUWB radio positioning fused with computer vision and optical flow

CommunicationsLTE/4G for BVLOS supervision + LoRa and ELRS long-range radio backup

PropulsionQuadcopter today — scaling to octocopter for payload and motor-out redundancy

AirframeAdditive manufacturing (3D printing) and CNC cutting, fully replicable locally

More than hardware: capacity transfer

Youth from the target communities are trained in digital fabrication, electronics, flight programming, and autonomous systems operation. Every donation funds not just aircraft — it builds the local human capital that keeps the service running independently, with all designs, firmware, and documentation released as open source.

Roadmap

Four phases from prototype to permanent service

Functional prototype ● current phase

Sensor integration (UWB, optical flow, RTK GPS), autonomous navigation calibration, OFFBOARD flight testing, and control architecture consolidation.

Field pilot in Colombia

Installation of precision landing markers at target communities, geospatial database of delivery points, and operational validation with real flights.

Technology transfer

Intensive workshops with local youth: manufacturing, UAV assembly, flight programming, and maintenance. Full transfer of know-how to the community.

Open-source release & scaling

Publication of the complete design, firmware, navigation software, and operations manual — so any region can replicate the delivery network.

Built by Zaid Cervantes Aguanche

Mechatronics Technologist (SENA, Colombia) based in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Vertically integrated development: mechanical design, digital fabrication, flight firmware, and navigation software — one accountable builder across the entire system, partnered with a pharmaceutical chemistry student at Universidad del Atlántico for medical logistics on the ground in Colombia.

Funding

$15,000 takes this from test bench to first real deliveries

The budget covers the complete development cycle: prototype and backup hardware, communications modules, airframe fabrication, the pilot deployment in Colombia, positioning infrastructure, flight insurance and permits, and training materials for the community workshops.

Campaign progress

$0 / $15,000

No administrative overhead. 100% of funds go directly to hardware, fabrication, field operations, and training. Every dollar produces a functional, documented, replicable system available to any community in need.

Recent supporters

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Put medicine in the air

Your contribution accelerates prototype development and brings the first medical deliveries closer to communities without road access. Donate securely by card, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, or Google Pay — right from this page.

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Representing a foundation, impact investor, or strategic partner? We'd love to talk — reach out through the project channels.