We’ve covered “middle mile” deliveries before, but a new robot in Singapore is covering what we’ll dub the “middle meter.” Last week, Singapore-based delivery service Grab launched its AHBOI robot at the Payar Lebar Quarters (PLQ) mall to speed up delivery orders placed at the restaurants located inside the shopping center.
AHBOI, which stands for Autonomous Handling and Batching Operating Intelligence, is a large, green rectangular mobile locker that acts as a food expediter. According to a Grab corporate blog post, the AHBOI collects delivery orders from different restaurants inside the mall and autonomously brings them to a central collection point where delivery drivers pick them up for the last mile delivery.
By shuttling food from restaurants across these middle meters to central pickup point, Grab says it can shave as much as 15 minutes off of a delivery time because the delivery driver doesn’t need to navigate their way to and inside the mall.
We are starting to see more automation appear over the middle meters and miles for food delivery. QSRs like Burger King and McDonald’s are eyeing conveyor belts at restaurants to speed up the movement of food from the kitchen to drive-thru customers. And companies like Valqari are setting up smart lockers where drones can drop off meals at a central location for delivery drivers or customers to pick up from. Using robots to consolidate orders in a large indoor setting like a mall makes a lot of sense.
As part of its blog post, Grab encouraged users to place more orders from the mall that would use AHBOI. The idea being that the more the robot traverses PLQ, the more AHBOI will learn about its environment and the better the robot will get at driving itself around the mall. Of course, more orders also means more revenue for Grab, which they could use to make more robots.
