It is hardly surprising that, in a climate of social distancing, demand for contactless deliveries is proving popular. While development work on autonomous vehicles may have paused for the time being, interest in autonomous delivery robots are having a moment. Regulators have also shown a willingness to cut red tape and allow robot fleets to help those stricken with COVID-19. Continuing just-auto/AIC’s series of research snapshots, Matthew Beecham looks at who is offering what with road-legal delivery robots and whether their usefulness will continue as we creep out of lockdown and into the ‘new normal’.
Although these lightweight, pedestrian-friendly electric vehicles have been quietly going about their business in airports, hotels and geo-fenced areas for some time, they are now appearing on housing estates delivering food to busy keyworkers or those fearful of catching coronavirus. These diminutive bots rely on clever technology such as cameras, LiDARS and deep-learning algorithms to drive themselves and complete each delivery.
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Middle mile ‘sweet spot’
An autonomous vehicle start-up based in Silicon Valley is developing Level 4 automated light trucks and vans for business-to-business (B2B) short-haul logistics. Founded just three years ago, Gatik AI has received funding from a number of investors. It has big aims too. By 2025, its goal is to achieve for logistics what Airbnb has done for hospitality, and Uber has done for personal transportation.
We often hear about autonomous delivery bots designed for sidewalks, robo-taxis and self-driving trucks yet Gatik is going after the ‘middle mile’ market. “The vast majority of our competitors are focusing on passenger transportation, and those that are working in the autonomous delivery space are trying to solve autonomy over a general/generic geo-fenced area,” Gautam Narang, Co-founder and CEO of Gatik told just-auto. “These models pose very different challenges, require specific technologies and as we have seen, will take a long time to achieve. Gatik also fills a clear gap in the market: on one end of the delivery spectrum there are self-driving trucks that operate with a large payload at highway speeds, and on the other end there are sidewalk robots that operate at restricted speeds, have limited weight capacity, and cover short distances. The middle mile is dramatically underserved, and we address this market need.”
Since the onset of the pandemic, Narang says his company has seen a 30% to 35% increase in the number of orders it completes each day. “We expect this figure to continue to rise due to increasing e-commerce in the COVID and post-COVID markets.”
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By GlobalDataMost recently, Gatik was announced as a PlanetM COVID-19 Mobility Grant recipient and will be expanding its operations into Michigan. In collaboration with one of the state’s largest retailers, this initiative will see its autonomous box trucks operating on predetermined, fixed routes. Its vehicles will be transporting essential goods between micro-fulfilment centres and customer pick-up points – facilitating online ordering and contactless delivery for Michigan’s residents.
Narang sees this uptake in demand for autonomous delivery vans as sustainable in the post COVID world. “Whereas others in the autonomous vehicle space have had to pause or scale back immediate deployments, Gatik is expanding long-term operations on both sides of the North American border due to an unprecedented demand for contactless delivery. We’ve seen a significant increase in interest from investors since the pandemic hit, which will help to ensure we’re well prepared to handle the increase in demand for our autonomous delivery solution and enable us to rapidly scale our teams in the USA and Canada.”
Last mile contactless deliveries to reduce the possibility of contagion
For some time, US e-commerce giant Amazon has been exploring the use of autonomous robots to make deliveries. The company officially rolled out its last-mile delivery robots in a Southern California testbed last year. Known as Amazon Scout, the delivery robot is designed to autonomously carry parcels from urban distribution points to Amazon Prime customers. Last month, Amazon was reported to be in talks to acquire autonomous driving technology startup ZooxInc. Acquiring Zoox would allow Amazon to strengthen its capabilities in the area of automated e-commerce delivery. Zoox is regarded as a leading global autonomous technology company and is understood to have raised close to US$1bn in investor funding so far. In 2018 it was valued at as much as US$3.2bn. Zoox aims to have a fully driverless car operational by the end of this year.
In 2018, Toyota took the wraps off a concept it called e-Pallete, fully automated battery-powered electric cars designed for a range of “mobility-as-a-service” businesses. At the time, the carmaker said it intends to work with companies such as SoftBank, Amazon, Didi Chuxing, Mazda, and Pizza Hut to deploy shuttles that can be used to deliver food, offer onboard medical examinations, double as hotel rooms, and more.
It is not the only big businesses wading into the autonomous robot delivery arena. There are plenty of startups attracting investment. Chinese start-up Neolix says it has experienced a massive surge in sales since the virus shocked the country earlier this year.
Last April, Softbank-backed Nuro received the first permit ever granted by the State of California to test a self-driving vehicle on public roads that is not only driverless, but also passenger-less. This permit allows Nuro to test its R2 vehicle to deliver medical supplies to a temporary COVID-19 hospital in Sacramento and food, water, and other supplies on an as-needed basis to a health facility in San Mateo County.
REV-1 is the name given to a food delivery robot developed by US-based Refraction AI. The startup is solving the last mile challenge by making low-cost, lightweight autonomous delivery robots that can operate in both the bike lane and on the roadway. Business has boomed over the past few months as Matthew Johnson-Roberson, CEO and co-founder of Refraction AI told just-auto: “Since the pandemic began, we’ve been experiencing 3-4 times as many restaurant orders as before. With partners on the waitlist, we’re moving quickly to build more robots to scale up and meet the demand.”
With new demands for AV delivery, the company recently launched a pilot programme for grocery delivery with a local store in Ann Arbor called Produce Station. “It’s completely free during the pilot phase as we test out this new model,” said Johnson-Roberson.
It’s not all short-term gains either. Like Gatik, Refraction AI also sees this uptake in demand for autonomous delivery robots as sustainable post COVID-19. “The newfound need for contactless delivery will allow people who were previously reluctant to try robot delivery before COVID to use it during the pandemic as a safer delivery option,” said Johnson-Roberson. “And as more people experience the service, we think they’ll see the real advantages around efficiency, convenience, and less human error. With acceptance of the technology during the pandemic, this can certainly change views and behaviours in the post-pandemic world.”
Starship Technologies is another startup offering a last mile robot delivery service. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia. Last March – just as Britain’s government issued stay-at-home orders – Starship became the first robot delivery service to operate in a UK town centre with the rollout of its service in central Milton Keynes. The company also announced that frontline heath care workers living and working in its UK service areas would be able to get free deliveries for a limited time period. Parcels, groceries and food can be directly delivered from stores via a Deliveroo-style phone app. Once ordered, a six-wheeled delivery robot’s entire journey and location can be tracked. Starship’s knee-high robots move at pedestrian speed, navigating around people and public spaces and weigh approx 100 pounds. For security, the cargo bay is mechanically locked throughout the journey and can be opened only by the recipient with their app.
For the past three months, Chinese startup Unity-Drive Innovation Technology (UDI) has been operating a small fleet of vans to deliver fresh fruit and veg to locked down communities across Zibo, Suzhou and Shenzhen. Each van is capable of carrying up to one ton of cargo in its compartment. Founded in 2018, UDI is developing L3 & L4 autonomous driving vehicles and the software, hardware, and algorithms to support them. “We are dedicated to making accessible autonomous driving technology reality by combining multi-sensor fusion, computer vision and deep learning,” states the company. “With an emphasis on multi-sensor fusion technology, we have established an integrated management mechanism of collaborating industry, university and research. Centered on the strategy of Robot+AI, we have developed core technologies such as the all-terrain 3D mapping, large-scale visual navigation, and LiDAR sensor fusion navigation.”
Public health benefit
While nobody can be sure what the ‘new normal’ will look like, we can be confident that social distancing will be with us for the foreseeable future. No longer seen as a joke or a fad, delivery robots have shifted from a novel way of doing business to a clear public health benefit. And unlike autonomous vehicles, we don’t have to trust them with our lives. As regulators cut more red tape – luring venture capitalists to pour millions into further development – we shouldn’t be surprised to see more quirky-looking bots sharing our roads and pavements in the post-coronavirus world. On the flip side, if robots do proliferate on our pavements as technology evangelists would have us believe then conflicts could emerge over who has the right to use them. But that’s another story.
