Flying cell towers are what the global fight to end poverty needs | Rahul Tiwari | TEDxMinneapolis

[Music] [Applause] i got on a flight to johannesburg to save the world three years ago i was a sophomore at purdue university when i had an idea i had developed a brand new type of drone one that could fly for 10 hours continuously without needing to land and recharge my idea was to give that drone to every anti-poaching team in africa a surveillance camera for rhino an elephant we would be able to catch poachers long before they got anywhere close to the precious animals and i talked to a lot of experts about this folks you'd see on that geo and they were generally positive about the idea but the one thing i kept hearing was that you know rahul drones can't solve this problem not entirely and i'm thinking yeah okay but you haven't seen my drugs and then i landed in south africa and reality sunk in i learned that anti-poaching really has two faces on the surface is a veneer a veneer designed to bring in a lot of western money you see tough armed to the teeth anti-poaching guys who look like they came out of call of duty marching around the reserves making sure that poachers can't get anywhere near the rhino but that is just a veneer just designed to bring in money real anti-poachers aren't so much concerned about catching poachers as they are about poverty you see the people who do the poaching the actual poachers themselves they tend to be the poorest people from the poorest parts of the world when they commit the poaching they'll often write in their own blood on the body of the animal please forgive me it was an act of desperation and this raises the question how did they get close to the rhino in the first place aren't there supposed to be these armed guards it turns out the armed guards aren't really paid all that much and they do love rhino and elephant but they love feeding their kids more and so bribing them is no difficult task and then you ask yourself okay then why doesn't the reserve owner just pay the anti-poaching people better it's because the reserve owner has learned that the best way to get international media attention press and most importantly money is to have a poaching incident happen within your walls drones can't solve this problem and i remember asking my friend and anti-poaching expert lb williams what do we do do we need to give more aid food water what's the catch here and he pointed out the window of his jeep to a group of kids wearing toms now tom's shoes on the surface is a brilliant concept the idea is you buy a pair of shoes here in the united states and they'll donate one to a child in need the problem is kids in africa already have a place to buy shoes african shoemakers make shoes but african shoemakers can't compete with free it's an example of how well-intentioned aid from the west can have unintended consequences in the field all throughout africa aid flows in water food vaccines these are really important people will die without them but then we get to bicycles backpacks shoes laptops and suddenly in a lot of these countries we aren't just fixing problems we're creating them by not allowing them to grow the western world has gotten wise to this they've started investing more in something called infrastructure aid it's development aid that actually helps people grow and back in the united states i dropped out of school i wanted to get in on this infrastructure aid thing i had some cool drones and i wasn't going to learn how to put those two things together in thermodynamics class after i dropped out i started a small company and took my drones to conferences around the world meeting the best and brightest to try to figure this out and all my roads led back to one place the internet now a poor village with the internet is unrecognizable from its former past a farmer in that village through the internet now has access to everything humanity knows about farming an entrepreneur in that village isn't just selling her goods to other villagers she's selling them to rich americans and bringing in more money into her economy than ever before a young school child who couldn't afford textbooks now has access to khan academy and becomes the smartest little girl that village has ever seen in short the internet has become the greatest tool for economic and individual liberation the world has ever seen and 49 of the world does not have it nearly half of the world does not have access to their best key out of poverty what in the world is going wrong well it turns out like a lot of things in the world the problem stems from one important thing cash cell phone towers are not cheap and you need a lot of them to cover an area to have good enough coverage in a city or town that makes a lot of sense to build enough cell phone towers to cover a rich city it might even make sense financially to build enough towers to cover a poor city but building enough cell phone towers to cover a poor suburb or a poor village no it doesn't work no one is going to pay to build 10 million cell phone towers in an african village and that's when i had an idea what if instead of 10 cell phone towers we could get away with just three the old model was building enough cell phone towers so you could have coverage everywhere all the time but let's say we're working in a religious town i know that on sunday morning those folks are gonna go to church so i can put up three cell phone towers by the church and cover everybody then i know monday morning they're gonna go to work or school so we'll put the cell phone towers near the commerce areas where the uh schools and work is and then in the evening they're going to go home so we can put the cell phone towers near the homes there's one small problem cell phone towers are really big and really heavy and like dug into the ground it's really hard it's impossible to move a cell phone tower but not if the cell phone tower can fly now what i'm telling you is patently ridiculous using a drone as a cell phone tower i talked to a lot of robotics experts about this and they kindly informed me that the escs were going to explode the motors were going to overheat the propeller attachment just wasn't going to hold this isn't possible and so we did it anyway i pulled together a team of the smartest people i knew into a garage in uptown minneapolis and we got to work and a month later after designing this system from the ground up we thought we had something that might be able to do it and so we took it to my parents backyard and tied it down we knew that if the motors could stay spinning we didn't even need to fly if the motors could stay spinning we would be able to stay in the air and so we started we ran the motors 24 hours passed motors are still going pretty good news one week two weeks three weeks four weeks that's a world record five weeks and after six weeks 42 days minneapolis got hit by a blizzard and we had to shut our test down but the point is we had a flying cell phone tower it worked and we were going to use it so what did we do naturally we went to france uh every year in cuberone they run the french national windsurfing championship and there are two big problems the first is the town of cuberon has a couple of hundred people and barely enough internet access to cover them when you bring in a thousand or several thousand people for a windsurfing championship their network just can't handle it and the second big problem for windsurfing championships is that windsurfing is really really boring to watch because you're standing on the beach and you have little dots out in the bay and that's that's the wind surfers they look like ants so we're going to try to solve both these problems within a couple of hours of arriving we were able to put up our flying cell phone towers and cover the entire area with 4g and 5g network coverage and we had a friend of ours who was also a drone pilot bring his drone along he put on a 16k 360 degree vr camera and flew his drone through the windsurfing championship suddenly we could live stream that video to people wearing virtual reality goggles on the beach you didn't have to watch little ants out in the sea you could fly through the competition and this was of course a huge development and a really cool new way to experience sports but we were not done a month later we had the opportunity to be involved with operation convergent response a large-scale demonstration of america's first responders and networking abilities post-disaster the situation we were involved in was a large-scale flood in perry georgia they actually flooded several city blocks and brought in hundreds of first responders to respond to the crisis and while they were out in the field our systems were flying to provide internet access and we learned a lot of important things while we were there when a disaster strikes it takes a few days to a few weeks for the cavalry to roll in the cellular on wheels systems the permanent towers for days and weeks first responders operate in the dark without internet and in the first days and weeks is when people are trapped in buildings and under floods today it's a highly manual process to go in from building the building and find them and unfortunately you leave a lot of stones unturned but if you can get internet access the day after a disaster happens everybody trapped their cell phone connects to the internet suddenly you know exactly where everybody trapped is and as a result a couple of months later and from this point a few weeks ago when hurricane laura slammed into the southern united states one day later our systems were there being tested as internet for first responders now the implications of our system for temporary events for disaster recovery are massive but we started this this idea of using a flying cell phone tower that you could move to help the global south to help where this entire journey started in africa and so a few weeks ago we got confirmation that we were going to send our first systems to kenya as africa's first drone-based flying cell towers i was telling some of my friends about this including one who was a telecom operator in south africa and he told me a story he told me about the story of how he tried to build a tower on a hill in south africa in a village so he built this tower at his own expense and went back to his office and a few days later his phone buzzed the cell phone tower had been stolen sold for scraps and so he went back at his own personal expense to build a new cell phone tower and this time for good measure he put a sign in both english and close-up please don't steal this he went back home and within a few days he got another notification the cell phone tower had been stolen he went back and lo and behold the cell phone tower was gone and the sign was gone too he had had enough this time he built a cell phone tower and put 600 volt spikes in the ground threatening anybody who would touch his precious cell phone tower with the penalty of death he went home a few hours later he got a phone call from a less than pleased government official who informed him that his spikes idea was not only a safety violation but a violation of human decency human rights and common sense and that he needed to go and take those spikes down before he hurt somebody so he drove back to the hill by the time he got there the tower and the spikes were already gone this raises an important point if we deploy it can't be our cell phone tower it's got to be theirs it's the farmer who grows enough crops to feed his people the entrepreneur who brings in unprecedented amounts of money into her local economy and it's the student who becomes smarter than anyone that village has ever seen when we deploy after a disaster it's the first responders who are actually saving lives enabled by our technology and fundamentally if we deploy it all it'll have been because of you you see drones can't solve this problem unless people like you pay attention people citizens of the richest and most powerful country in the world of which i am one too and despite that it took me a flight to south africa to learn that some of the world's biggest problems were simply symptoms of poverty it took me a flight to south africa to learn that we already had a really great solution to help people get out of poverty the internet and almost half the world didn't have access and it took a flight to south africa to meet the people who inspired me enough to try to do something about it i hope you'll consider this your flight to south africa [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 33,521

Rating: 4.6011963 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Developing World, Global issues, Innovation, Internet, Poverty

Id: 8yGO5nD3jGw

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020