Category: Behind the Bot
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One potential benefit of a city filled with people looking down at their phones is that they might be better able to see all the little delivery robots scurrying around on the ground. The sidewalks will be getting even more crowded as both Pepsi and Ninebot, Segway’s parent company, have announced separate delivery robot initiatives.…
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Third-party delivery service DoorDash just announced it has partnered with General Motors’ Cruise Automation to test autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. Cruise has been testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco over the last three years. Equipped with Lidar and radar sensors, as well as cameras that take pictures at 10 frames per second, the…
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The food delivery craze will normalize at some point, but not soon. Right now, it’s a segment projected to be worth $365 billion by 2030, and even companies with inherently undeliverable foods are delivering. All of which is to say, food delivery holds a well-earned spot on the list of 2019 hot topics. Major delivery…
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South Korean company Woowa Bros., which runs the Baedal Minjok food delivery app, announced yesterday that it has received a $320 million from Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital and GIC. This brings the total amount raised by Woowa to $482.8 million. According to Reuters, Woowa says it will use the new funding to expand internationally and,…
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Spyce received a patent this week for its robot-run restaurant. Patent number US 10,154,762 B was awarded to Spyce on December 18 for “Automated Meal Production System and Apparatus.” The patent is filled with the requisite mechanical drawings and legalese, but there were a couple of things that stood out. From the patent filing: The…
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Kroger announced today that it is ejecting humans from its autonomous delivery vehicle pilot, and going full-on, self-driving car with expanded availability. Since August, the grocery retailer has been working with robotics company Nuro, testing grocery delivery via autonomous vehicles in Scottsdale, AZ. The initial test run completed close to one thousand deliveries. However, those were…
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Like a Spinal Tap drummer, one of Kiwi‘s delivery robots caught fire last Friday while out and about on the campus of UC Berkeley. While no human was harmed during the conflagration, this isn’t great news for the nascent startup, which has just started working to expand to other locations. According to the Daily Californian,…
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While the Denver Broncos may be in the midst of a losing season, they could win over fans this weekend when a new robot starts dispensing Bud Light at Mile High Stadium (h/t The Washington Post). You’d think that such a mechanical miracle would have a fancy name like the “Robo-Bronco” or the “Elway 3000,”…
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You know what you can look forward to in 2019? More robots (but more on that in a later post). Case in point: delivery service Postmates announced today that it has developed its own autonomous delivery rover that will be hitting sidewalks next year. Dubbed Serve, the li’l robot is a bright yellow square-shaped box…
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Flippy, the burger flipping, fry cooking robot, is auditioning for a new gig in Walmart’s deli department, according to Yahoo Finance. The retail giant has been testing Flippy out at its Culinary Institute and Innovation Center, where the robot fries up items like potato wedges, mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders. This wouldn’t be the first…
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The sitcom, Cheers, probably would have been a lot less funny if the role of Sam the bartender had been played by an robotic, drink-pouring arm. I mean, sure, it can serve up glasses of chablis, but it probably can’t yell out “NORM!” Reuters reports there’s a new robotic cocktail slinger in town, and it…
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When we talk about robots in restaurants, we often talk about the human jobs that will be lost to this impending automation. But a cafe that opened in Tokyo this week is actually using robots to create jobs for people with physical disabilities. The Japan Times reports that the Dawn Avatar cafe in Minato Ward,…
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