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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

autonomous delivery

Autonomous Middle-Mile Company Gatik Raises $25M

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik announced today that it has raised a $25 million Series A round of funding. The round was co-led by Wittington Ventures and Innovation Endeavors with participation from FM Capital and Intact Ventures, as well as existing investors Dynamo Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, AngelPad and others. This brings the total amount raised by Gatik to $29.5 million.

Unlike other players in the self-driving delivery space, the Palo Alto, California-based Gatik is focused on the middle-mile — that is, the intra-location routes for a business, for example warehouse to store, store to store, etc.

The advantage of this, from a self-driving vehicle perspective, is that these middle-mile routes are fixed and repeated. This reduces the amount of “thinking” that a self-driving vehicle has to do as it carries goods around because it’s not encountering as many new scenarios. These fixed routes can also help put regulators creating laws around self-driving vehicles more at ease because of their limited scope and reach.

From a business’ perspective, like a grocer, a fleet of autonomous middle-mile vehicles could run all day, every day, ensuring that locations are always fully stocked. In its press announcement, Gatik said that its autonomous vehicles are operating up to seven days a week, 12 hours a day, on single routes up to 300 miles.

Along with its funding announcement, Gatik today also announced that Canada’s Loblaw grocery chain will deploy a fleet of five Gatik vehicles for middle mile delivery in Toronto starting in January 2021. Gatik’s cargo trucks feature temperature control, so they can be used for the transport of cold and frozen foods as well.

In the Loblaw press announcement, Gatik said that its autonomous vehicles will run between automated picking facilities and retail stores, and allows for inventory pooling across multiple location, as well as contactless delivery.

November has been a busy month for autonomous delivery. Last week Walmart announced a partnership with Cruise for self-driving grocery delivery. Nuro announced it had raised another $500 million for its self-driving pod vehicle solution. Part of the reason for all of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated interest in contactless delivery options to reduce human-to-human interaction.

Gatik has previously worked with Walmart, and says it has conducted 30,000 autonomous orders for multiple Fortune 500 customers across North America.  

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said Gatik raised $22.5 million. We regret the error.

PIX Moving Makes a Customizable Autonomous Chassis for Delivery

There are a variety of different autonomous vehicles of all shapes and sizes coming to market: From the cargo vans of Udelv, to the pod-like R2 from Nuro, all the way down to the cooler sized sidewalk robots from Starship.

Chinese company Pix Moving is taking a bit of a different approach to autonomous vehicles by removing most of the vehicle. The company is building a self-driving chassis platform on top of which its customers can build whatever they like.

So a big restaurant chain could create a mobile pod of lockers for meal delivery, or a grocery store could create a temperature-controlled store on wheels. A large warehouse-type store could just attach a flat base for moving inventory around.

PIX’s chassis is electric and low-speed, which allows it to sidestep some of the more complex regulations associated with full-sized, full-speed autonomous vehicles. All four wheels of the PIX chassis are steerable, making it highly maneuverable. It’s also 3D printed, so its lightweight and there are fewer parts. And, like any autonomous vehicle, it is packed with an array of sensors and cameras to navigate and avoid obstacles.

I spoke with Chase Cao, PIX COO, by phone this week and he explained that his company is currently navigating the rules and regulations both in China and the U.S. to get its self-driving platform running on public roads. In the meantime, its chassis is being used on some private corporate campuses in both countries. Right now, PIX sells its chassis outright, though Cao said they may look at more of a leasing model in the future.

PIX is worth watching, especially as it relates to food delivery, because of the flexibility of its platform. By pushing the design of the compartments that carry the cargo to its customers (restaurants, grocers, etc.), those compartments can be tailored to a specific set of needs (size, temperature, etc.). This can then create more efficient delivery, and thereby generating even more demand for autonomous delivery.

In other words, there will be even more variety of self-driving vehicles coming to our roads.

Nuro Raises $500M for its Autonomous Delivery Vehicles

Nuro announced today that it has raised a $500 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from new investors that include Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Baillie Gifford, as well as participation from existing investors SoftBank Vision Fund 1 and Greylock. This brings the total amount raised by Nuro to $1.5 billion.

Nuro makes pod-like, self-driving, low-speed cargo delivery vehicles. Nuro’s R2 vehicle is roughly half the size of a regular car, is autonomous (there is literally no place for a driver to sit) and travels at 25 mph.

But equally as important as its technology is Nuro’s work around getting regulatory approvals for deliveries. Self-driving vehicles are new, and all levels of government are coming to grips with how to regulate the concept to ensure safety on public streets. In February of this year, Nuro got approvals from the federal government to drive on public roads. This was followed up in April when the state of California gave Nuro the green light to run on its public roads.

Nuro has also done a number of tests over the past couple of years, delivering food for Kroger and Walmart as well as Domino’s.

At the end of October, Nuro revealed that it had been running fully autonomous tests, meaning no drivers and no chase cars, successfully over the previous few months in Houston, TX, Phoenix, AZ and Mountain View, CA. You can see a video of the R2 in action here:

Nuro’s technology is certainly coming to market at the right time. The global pandemic has more people staying at home and thereby ordering more restaurant meals and groceries for delivery. Nuro’s vehicle can carry a full load of groceries directly to a customer’s curbside around the clock. The autonomous nature of the Nuro also means that delivery is contactless, an important feature as people look to reduce human-to-human contact in order to stem the transmission of the virus.

Nuro isn’t alone in the autonomous last-mile delivery space. Other players range from the small cooler-sized robots of Starship to the larger three-wheeled REV-1 from Refraction to the cargo vans of Udelv.

In other words, autonomous delivery is coming, and Nuro now has more money to assert its place when it arrives.

Udelv Offers its Driverless Delivery Vans to Assist with Coronavirus Efforts

If there is anything “lucky” about the deadly coronavirus outbreak marching its way across the world, it could be the timing. At at time when human-to-human interactions, especially in quarantined areas, need to be limited, we actually live in a world where driverless delivery vehicles and robots aren’t science fiction, but could actually be a viable means to supply delivery.

In Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus which is currently on lockdown, online grocery shopping has been a lifeline for those forced to stay home. Even here in the U.S. where no large-scale quarantines are in place, the New York-based online grocer FreshDirect has attributed a spike in sales to media coverage around COVID-19.

But in both of those scenarios, you still have human drivers bringing food to human customers. In China, they’ve implemented a contactless method for delivery wherein the delivery person and the consumer remain ten feet apart from each other, but there is still a human putting themselves at risk to feed another human.

Given that there are a host of startups working on self-driving delivery technology, we at The Spoon were wondering if and when any of them would raise their hand to help out in the efforts to combat the effects of the coronavirus.

Today, Udelv, which makes self-driving and tele-operated delivery vans, made such a move, and on Twitter announced that it was ready to pitch in.

At first, this may seem like some mercenary Silicon Valley grab for press attention amidst a humanitarian crisis. But two things can be true at the same time.

To find out more about Udelv’s intentions, I spoke with its CEO, Daniel Laury, by phone today. He explained that his company’s delivery trucks could be useful in quarantine situations such as the one in Wuhan because they can be tele-operated. There is still someone driving the delivery van, they are just housed in a remote location. Vans could be sent in to deliver food, medicine or other supplies without putting a human driver at risk.

Additionally, Udelv trucks are built with customizable individual cargo compartments. Each order has its own delivery cubby that is unlocked with user’s phone when it arrives. So a grocery route could have multiple stops with people only able to access their own orders.

Asked if he would charge for the use of Udelv’s services, Laury told me “This is done with the best intention. I’m not charging. I’m not going to make money on this.”

In talking with him, it seemed like Laury saw what was going on and saw that his company might be able to help. He hasn’t worked through all of the details yet; for example, rules around autonomous vehicles on public roads have only recently been enacted here in the US, though I imagine there could exceptions made for extreme quarantine situations. And Laury doesn’t have a particular sanitization workflow in mind. It’s one thing to not have a human driver, but if you have an infected person touching or coughing at the inside of a cargo hold, that cargo hold will need some kind of scrub down.

“We’re expert in autonomous trucking, not viruses,” Laury told me. He considers Udelv’s truck just another tool that could be used to help fight the outbreak. Udelv would provide vans to a government agency like the CDC, and they would institute proper sterilization procedures. His company would just make sure supplies gets from point A to B.

So far Udelv has not been contacted by any government agencies either at home or abroad. Udelv doesn’t even operate in China, but Laury said he’s happy to put some vans on a boat if they want. “I don’t know anyone at the CDC or the administration that I can contact directly,” Laury said. “It’s one of the reasons I put out this tweet. Maybe it’s picked up by someone who is in charge.”

If someone in charge is reading, perhaps you can take look at how autonomous vehicles might be able to help.

Domino’s Innovation Garage Doubles Down on GPS Tracking, Driverless Cars

Domino’s has wasted no time in ramping up its innovations since opening the doors on its Innovation Garage in August. And at an event held at the facility this week, the pizza chain-turned-tech company highlighted a couple of the top innovations it is currently working on.

Nation’s Restaurant News, who was at the event, reported on these developments, which are geared towards getting pizzas to customers’ doorsteps as fast and as seamlessly as possible.

GPS tracking technology topped the list of developments the company is working on. Earlier this year, Domino’s started testing its system that lets customers and stores track drivers in 27 company-owned locations around Phoenix, Arizona. The system allows customers to see their driver’s progress on a map and receive a notification when their pizza is just a couple minutes away. Store managers can also track drivers via a screen inside the store. Domino’s has said it will roll out this tracking technology to all U.S. stores by the end of 2019.

At the Innovation Garage this week, the company wouldn’t give data on how much GPS tracking improves the pizza delivery experience, but said Domino’s locations are seeing improvements and that more of them are adopting the technology.

Speaking of cars, the company also said at the event that it has finished its testing of autonomous delivery in Houston, TX, and is ready to officially roll the program out in that city. Domino’s piloted driverless delivery this past summer, teaming up with a company called Nuro, who makes a fully automated, low-speed vehicle about half the size of a regular car.

With Nuro, customers who select the “autonomous” option when ordering a pizza use a PIN to unlock the car when it arrives and retrieve their pizza.

For now, autonomous delivery via Nuro will be concentrated on the downtown Houston area. Domino’s didn’t say whether a larger rollout is planned for other parts of the city or the U.S. However, highlighting the struggles around rising labor costs and the struggle to find enough drivers, Domino’s Chief Digital Officer Dennis Maloney said at the event, “This is the future of our company.”

DoorDash Acquires Autonomous Vehicle Startup Scotty Labs

Tele-operations platform Scotty Labs announced this morning via a blog post it has been acquired by DoorDash. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Scotty Labs’ current platform allows humans to operate autonomous vehicles via remote control. According to the company’s LinkedIn page, advancing autonomous driving isn’t about removing humans from the equation completely, but letting them instead play a more virtual role in the process. The company previously partnered with Voyage to help them deploy autonomous vehicles around retirement communities. It has also tested a self-driving truck on a California freeway, which you can watch here.

This isn’t DoorDash’s first time working with an autonomous vehicle company. At the beginning of 2019, the delivery company partnered with General Motors’ Cruise Automation to test autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. Going even further back, DoorDash worked with Starship in 2017 to test delivery via semi-autonomous wheeled bots.

The Scotty Labs acquisition comes at a time when DoorDash faces significant scrutiny from the industry. The company received a storm of bad press over its tipping policies, which skim from drivers’ tips to pay their base wage. Although DoorDash said it would change that policy, the company has yet to act on those words.

DoorDash is also rumored to be chasing an IPO, and should that happen, the company will likely face the same struggles around profitability its competitor Uber Eats has experienced.

One way to get closer to actual profitability and avoid controversial tipping policies is to not have to pay human drivers. Only yesterday, The Spoon team was internally discussing the future of third-party delivery, wondering aloud if controversial tipping policies, proposed caps on commission fees, and horror stories from the drivers themselves wouldn’t quickly spur companies towards a more autonomous future. It seems DoorDash is already headed in that direction.

Kroger and Nuro Expand Self-Driving Grocery Delivery to Houston

They say everything is bigger in Texas, but soon, diminutive electric vehicles will be autonomously shuttling around Houston, as Kroger announced today it is expanding its self-driving grocery pilot with Nuro to Texas’ largest city.

Kroger began its self-driving partnership with Nuro in Scottsdale, AZ in August last year and in that time has made thousands of deliveries, according to today’s press announcement. The expansion into Houston will involve two Kroger stores serving four zip codes:

  • Store One: 10306 South Post Oak Road, Houston, TX, servicing 77401 and 77096
  • Store Two: 5150 Buffalo Speedway, Houston, TX, servicing 77005 and 77025

Today’s news comes a little over a month since SoftBank invested $940 million in Nuro, which makes the R1, a pod-like, electric low-speed vehicle. They are about half the size of a traditional car and have a top speed of 25 mph. But Houstonians won’t see those pods on the street quite yet. Similar to the Scottsdale program, the Houston roll out will initially use self-driving Toyota Priuses, before shifting to Nuro’s R1s next year.

While the pilot in Scottsdale has evidently generated enough positive results to expand the program to a more populated city like Houston, there is still a bigger question over whether people want self-driving vehicles for grocery delivery. Part of the value in grocery delivery is the delivery person, who lugs heavy bags from the curb to your front door (or up your steps). This is one reason Nuro’s self-driving rival, AutoX, is putting more emphasis on its restaurant food delivery business.

Kroger didn’t provide a specific launch date for its Houston delivery, only saying that it will start this Spring.

Autonomous grocery delivery is definitely something we will be talking about at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot conference next month in San Francisco. AutoX’s COO, Jewel Li will be speaking as well as Ali Ahmed, the CEO of Robomart, which also uses pod-like vehicles to get you your food. Get your tickets today!

Can FedEx’s Autonomous Bot Improve Pizza Hut’s Last-Mile Logistics Problem?

Last week, my colleague Chris Albrecht noted that FedEx is launching an autonomous delivery vehicle called SameDay Bot. Pizza Hut, whose delivery strategy has had to undergo major changes in recent months, has jumped on board the opportunity and will use the bot to deliver to hungry customers later this year.

FedEx’s creation is a zero-emission, battery-powered bot designed to travel sidewalks and roads, and even climb stairs and curbs. FedEx enlisted the help of engineer Dean Kamen, best known as the inventor of the Segway, to develop the vehicle. And since it’s autonomous, the bot is equipped with mapping tools and cameras that allow it to maneuver through cities without crashing into pedestrians or upsetting other aspects of sidewalk life. It looks like a small fridge on wheels. When it reaches its destination, two doors automatically open and customers can grab their pizzas from inside.

Pizza Hut’s test run is slated for summer 2019 in Memphis, TN.

Getting a hot pizza into a customer’s hands — also known as last-mile logistics — is a key area for companies to get right when it comes to delivery. There are tons of potential solutions out there, from Postmates’ adorable li’l rover Served to Kiwi’s bots, currently roaming the streets of Westwood in Los Angeles.

Pizza chains seem especially aggressive when it comes to solving the last-mile logistics question — justifiably so, since pizza gets cold quickly and, despite coming in a nice, stackable box, will sometimes upset in transit and leave half the cheese and toppings on the cardboard, not the pie.

Partnering with FedEx isn’t Pizza Hut’s first foray into last-mile solutions. Last year, the Plano, TX-based company unveiled an autonomous kitchen that would cook pizzas in transit. The Tundra PIE Pro, as it’s called, is still a prototype, and Pizza Hut hasn’t disclosed if or when it will actually come to market. The company also expanded beer delivery earlier this year.

Even so, The Hut has its work cut out when it comes to standing out in last-mile logistics. Its chief rival, Domino’s, is widely recognized as one of the most tech-savvy and innovative restaurant companies in business today. Last year it launched “HotSpots,” or delivery locations that don’t have a traditional address but are instead places like parks, beaches, and other areas where groups gather. Domino’s has over 150,000 of these so far. In a completely separate endeavor, the company also expanded its partnership with what3words, whose algorithm converts GPS coordinates into more precise address locations. Domino’s is finding this initiative especially helpful in countries where traditional, orderly street addresses aren’t necessarily a guarantee.

Domino’s builds most of its tech in-house. Pizza Hut’s success with the SameDay Bot, meanwhile, will in part depend on FedEx, since the technology belongs to the latter. If FedEx decides the technology is a bust and shelves it, Pizza Hut will have to find another route to autonomous delivery vehicles. On the other hand, FedEx is a last-mile logistics company, and the SameDay bot could very well prove itself an efficient, cost-effective way of delivering products. In that case, Pizza Hut will have found a far cheaper solution to autonomous delivery than any in-house tech ever could be — for the company, its franchises, and its customers.

SoftBank Expands its Driverless Delivery Empire with $940M Nuro Investment

SoftBank has invested $940 million into driverless vehicle startup Nuro The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal is noteworthy not just for the amount of money involved, but also for the growth it could spur in driverless delivery, as well as how it plays into SoftBank’s portfolio of automated mobility companies.

Nuro makes autonomous, low-speed electric pod-like vehicles that are about half the size of a traditional car. These pods are built from the ground up to carry goods, and there is literally no room for a driver. Since the pods are light, nimble and top out at 25 mph, they could be a safer alternative to full-sized autonomous vehicles and therefore a more attractive option for risk-averse city planners and regulators creating laws around the emerging driverless delivery space.

One has to wonder how the folks at Robomart, which makes similar pod-like vehicles, are feeling today. On the one hand, Robomart is going after a different market, forsaking direct point-to-point delivery in favor of mobile commerce, so they aren’t direct competitors, and SoftBank’s massive money drop is a validation of low-speed vehicles as a technology. But Nuro’s pods are already being tested by grocery giant Kroger to deliver groceries in Arizona, and this cash infusion will help Nuro quickly scale up is engineering, production and business development. Nuro now has the money to invest in and improve its technology and get its platform used by more partners, potentially boxing out Robomart.

But almost more interesting than Nuro’s newfound cash to expand is Softbank as the investor. Over the past year, SoftBank has made a number of bets on mobility and food delivery:

  • SoftBank and Toyota teamed up for a joint venture called MONET, which will create an autonomous vehicle platform for a number of different smart mobility services including food delivery and even mobile food preparation.
  • SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume, which uses vast amounts of data to predict the amount of pizza delivery on any given night, as well as robots to prepare those pizzas, and mobile ovens to heat them just-in-time for delivery.
  • SoftBank is an investor in both DoorDash and Uber Eats, two food delivery services experimenting with self-driving vehicles, robot delivery and perhaps even drone delivery.

With the Nuro investment, SoftBank adds another delivery form factor (low speed pods) to its logistical lineup. With all of these investments that connect goods and consumers, Softbank is setting itself up to be a dominant player in our increasingly self-driving and delivery-filled future.

Mod Pods! NEXT Future Transportation Announces Mobile Lockers

A lot of transportation in old sci-fi movies was pod-based. People would travel through futuristic cities in quiet, autonomous, sleek pods that picked them up and dropped them off. What those movies missed, and is now becoming a reality, are fleets of pods running around to bring us our packages, restaurant food and groceries.

That’s one vision of NEXT Future Transporation, which today announced its Modular Mobile Parcel Locker. While still in the experimental stage, NEXT has created a platform that combines robotic warehouses, logistics software and yes, traveling pods, to transform how people and goods get transported.

The best way to understand the process is to watch the video below, but basically, NEXT has created small pods that can be intelligently loaded by robots in a warehouse. These pods can connect (while moving!) to form what is essentially a long, moving train on wheels. The pods then break off to go make deliveries at specific locations. Once at its destination, the recipient would use their phone to unlock the pod and accept delivery.

NEXT Future Transportation - Last Mile Parcel Delivery Solution

NEXT showed off its pod-based transport in action back in February at The World Government Summit in Dubai. There it was demonstrated as a way for people to commute. Today’s announcement shows how NEXT is thinking of its platform for package (and food!) delivery.

When it comes to moving goods, the company refers to the pods as Modular Mobile Parcel Lockers, and they can be customized to meet specific retailer’s needs. One could have refrigerated compartments to keep groceries at the right temperature, or conversely hot ones if delivering pizzas or other cooked foods.

In order to overcome municipal safety concerns about self-driving vehicles and speed up adoption of its system, NEXT is actually not focusing on autonomous vehicles to start. The company’s pods can come with a human driver to comply with the evolving set of regulations as self-driving vehicles come to market.

NEXT is launching its Mobile Parcel Locker at a time when the roadways are seeing more hot pod action. Toyota announced its e-Palette concept at CES earlier this year, and while they don’t connect together like some cargo Voltron, e-Palettes are autonomous, customizeable pods that can be used to carry just about anything.

Both NEXT and Toyota are both eyeing 2020 as a timeframe for an actual launch. In the nearer term, Kroger and Nuro have started a pilot of grocery delivery via autonomous vehicle. The two are using regular cars right now, but Nuro makes its own autonomous pod that will be implemented soon. On a smaller scale, companies like Kiwi, Starship and Alibaba are all using small, autonomous robots for shorter range delivery of food and other items.

In other words, this is no longer science fiction. We need to start thinking about a future where autonomous pods big and small are scurrying around our streets, dropping off deliveries (and people) around the clock. It’s going to change how we eat, how we move about our cities, how we interact with retail and how we interact with one another.

How Starship’s Hub & Spoke Robot Delivery Model Could Change Food Delivery

As semi-autonomous delivery robots wind their way through the streets of Greenwich, a borough of London, England, delivering take-out meals to local diners, we are witness to a small glimpse of how such technology will forever change the food ecosystem.

While Starship Technologies’ partnership with Just Eat, a home delivery service connecting consumers to their favorite restaurants, has received a significant amount of media attention, robotic delivery has far broader—and perhaps more socially significant—possibilities. Starship’s hub-and-spoke vision—that is a scenario where large amounts of goods—in this case, food—are taken to a central location after which an army of semi-autonomous robots take the wares the last quarter mile to individual homes.

Two obvious scenarios of this application of Starship’s innovation are home grocery delivery and bringing needed fresh food to a growing number of food deserts (areas outside the logistical reach of farms and farmers markets). For the home grocery startups such as Instacart, robots allow workers to focus more on careful curation than transporting sacks of produce, canned goods and other staples to local residents. Much the way newspapers set up substations where the daily papers are taken in bundles to individual districts where they are sorted and doled out to kids on bikes, supermarket chains or other food distribution can create a value-chain efficiency that benefits their bottom lines while providing a valuable service.

It’s clear that such a scenario is in Starship Technologies’ plans. In early September, the company announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz to develop “robot vans” which could bring the hub-and-spoke model to life. According to its press release, Starship said it will work with the German car manufacturer to build a transportation system in which specially-designed Sprinter vans will hold up to eight delivery robots. Based on location density and consumer needs, the vans will make their rounds dropping off, and later picking up, individual robotic delivery agents. While not mentioned in the release, a backend with carefully programmed robust logistical software and a “service center” where multiple robots can be simultaneously monitored will be needed.

A few enhancements would be needed to the current robot agent to truly optimize its capabilities. According to Starship Technologies, the semi-autonomous unit can hold up to 22 pounds and uses the insulation provided by the restaurant or its delivery service. In order to deal with larger deliveries—such as supplies to prep kitchens– or perishables, greater capacity and commercial insulation will need to be added to the units.

Moving from commercial needs to the greater good, the creation of a system to cut down on the growing number of food deserts will require more hands on deck. One of those additional hands might come in the form of delivery drones from the likes of Amazon, already in the business of efficient home delivery. The Seattle-based retail giant prides itself in leaving no address “unaddressable” when it comes to getting goods and services to the far reaches of the planet.

As with previous innovations, advances in food technology—particularly in logistics—first movers don’t always have an advantage. Lurking in the background—some not so subtly—are key players such as incumbents UPS and FedEx, as well as newcomers to the asynchronous delivery transport world including Uber and Lyft. In short order, autonomous vehicles of every shape and size will be in plentiful supply; how entrepreneurs in the food industry deploy them will separate the winners from the losers.