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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery robots

SKS 2021: Meet Ottonomy, Maker of Autonomous Food Delivery Robots

Time to meet Ottonomy, one of the ten startups pitching tomorrow at Smart Kitchen Summit!

Ottonomy is a maker of autonomous delivery robots. Unlike most other sidewalk delivery bots, Ottonomy can navigate through both outdoors and indoor environments. The company, led by longtime robotics entrepreneur Ritukar Vijay, was founded last year and has already racked up mobile ordering partners like Crave.

So why did Vijay, who has worked on autonomous mobility solutions for car makers like BMW, decide to focus on a delivery bot?

“One thing which struck me is that autonomous cars will still take some time to hit the mainstream,” said Vijay. “So what is the best way to actually utilize that know-how to solve a problem of today? That’s how we came down to delivery. Because that’s something which is a real use case that autonomous driving can solve.”

While competition is heating up in this space, Vijay believes his product is hitting the market at just the right time.

“The labor shortage is hitting the restaurants and wages have increased massively,” said Vijay. “So it becomes very, very difficult for large businesses to give a solution the customer expect and have a sustainable future. At the same time, from the customer side, they want a cleaner, faster and cheaper way of getting those kinds of services. So it’s a win-win from both customer and the restaurant side.”

You can watch Carlos Rodela’s full interview with Ritukar Vijay below. If you’d like to connect with Vijay at the Smart Kitchen Summit, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interviews - Ottonomy

Los Angeles International Airport Rolls Out NomNom, a Semi-Autonomous Food Delivery Robot

Los Angeles International is not my favorite airport. It’s crowded, has nine (nine!) terminals that take forever to navigate, and traffic blows once you get in your rental car and head to the Sunset Strip.

But all will be forgotten on my next trip through Los Angeles if NomNom, the airport’s new delivery robot, brings me food.

That’s right. LAX announced today it’s launching a pilot program for a 40-pound cargo bot by the name of NomNom. NomNom is a two-wheeled semi-autonomous top-loading delivery bot that moves at 6 miles per hour and uses a human guide to navigate the airport.

NomNom is being rolled out in partnership with AtYourGate, a food delivery service provider for airports that powers the food delivery service at LAX. When a consumer orders food through the airport’s food delivery portal LAX Order Now, guests at eligible terminals will be given an option to have a delivery or an additional fee. In addition, travelers will be given an estimated delivery time to ensure their food gets there before they have to rush off to catch a flight.

The robot, which uses cameras and sensors to follow its handler around the airport, is a gita, the delivery bot designed and built by Piaggio Fast Forward (PFF), a division of Piaggio Group, the maker of the Vespa scooter (could we see a Vespa delivery bot someday?). This is the second US airport to roll out a gita (Philly was first).

Airports have proven to be a favorite testing ground for food robots of all kinds. First, it was coffee bots like Cafe-X and Briggo, then came ramen, and now it looks like delivery bots are rolling in.

You can check out NomNom in the video below.

NomNom the delivery robot at LAX

Will LG Make a Meal Out of its new Outdoor/Indoor Delivery Robot?

Consumer electronics giant LG unveiled a new indoor/outdoor rover robot at the Ubiquitous Robot 2021 conference yesterday in South Korea. The company aims to test the new robotic platform at the end of this year.

Though a number of Korean news outlets reported the story, there weren’t a ton of details available about the new robot. We know it was developed in conjunction with MIT Associate Professor Sangbae Kim at LG Boston Robotics Lab, and that the four-wheeled robot can adjust the gap between its wheels to adapt quickly to uneven terrain for a smoother ride.

But there are still plenty of questions unanswered questions. We don’t know what level of autonomy the robot has. For example, is it completely self-driving or is it teleguided? Will it be available outside of Korea, and if so, when? What industries is LG looking to sell this robot to? Given the robot’s ability to minimize jostling as it travels, food and meal delivery seems like a no-brainer. Additionally, the Aju Business Daily reported that LG released the following statement along with its new robot: “The integrated next-generation delivery robot is the result of our preemptive response to customers’ increased demands for non-face-to-face services.” Meal delivery was among the first services to go contactless during the pandemic last year, so it makes sense that such delivery would be on LG’s roadmap.

This isn’t LG’s first foray into robotics. In January of this year the company debuted its BaristaBot to serve coffee to workers at LG’s headquarters in Seoul. Last December, the company began using its CLOi robots to make deliveries from convenience stores to people inside its LG Science Park in Seoul. And in July of 2020, LG partnered with Woowa Brothers and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement to develop robot waiters.

What makes this latest robot more interesting than its previous robo-plays, however, is how it could alter the existing robot delivery market. Startups such as Starship, Serve and Kiwibot have been making robo-deliveries for years at this point, but what neither of those companies have is scale. LG is a giant electronics company that is better equipped to mass produce these rovers and bring their costs down. With its global reach, LG could then sell or lease robots more cheaply than existing robot companies to third-party delivery services (Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc.). You can kind of see a blueprint for such a deal in the recent Grubhub/Yandex partnership. Additionally, a company with the brand recognition and reputation of LG could also help spur adoption from reluctant potential partners and get more robots making deliveries.

NOTE: The LG image featured in this post is via The Korea Bizwire.

Starship Appoints New CEO

Robot delivery company Starship announced today that Alastair Westgarth has been appointed the company’s new CEO, effective immediately.

Prior to joining Starship, Westgarth was CEO at Alphabet’s Loon, which was focused on using high-altitude balloons to deliver internet access to underserved communities around the world. That endeavor was shut down in January of this year. Before joining Loon in 2017, Westgarth was CEO at Quintel Solutions and a Vice President at Nortel.

Starship makes small, cooler-sized autonomous delivery robots. The company really started gaining traction in the U.S. over the past couple of years by providing food deliveries on college campuses. Starship has since broadened it services to include grocery delivery from Save Mart in Modesto, California. In May of this year, Starship started making deliveries from select Costa Coffee locations in the town of Milton Keynes in the U.K.

The appointment of a new CEO comes during a time of growth for Starship. In January, the company raised an additional $17 million in funding (bringing its total fundraising to $102 million). The company’s delivery robots are now available to more than 1 million people on a daily basis, and last month it announced that it had quadrupled deliveries globally since the start of the pandemic. To date, Starship has completed more than 1.5 million commercial deliveries around the world.

The pandemic has accelerated interest in robot delivery, thanks to its contactless nature. Since Starship launched, a number of robot delivery startups have launched around the world including Kiwibot and Postmates here in the U.S., Yandex in Russia, Woowa Brothers in South Korea, and Bizero in Turkey. The question for all of these startups now is whether the building, maintaining and deploying all of these robots can scale in an economical way.

According to the press announcement sent out today, Starship’s co-founder, Ahti Heinla, will now be taking on the role of CTO. The company did not specify what new role, if any fellow co-founder Janus Friis would be taking.

Delivery Hero’s Tackling a Major Hurdle to More Diversity in Tech

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When Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero launched its recent Tech Academy recently, it showed us one way to create both more and better jobs in the restaurant industry — and make those available to a wider swath of the population. The question is, Will the Delivery Hero Tech Academy be successful enough to influence others in the increasingly tech-centric restaurant industry?

The Tech Academy will teach tech skills to “underrepresented groups” to promote more diversity and inclusion, and also give people more options when it comes to finding a job. To do this, Delivery Hero teamed up with the Digital Career Institute (DCI). Founded in 2016 in Berlin, DCI was originally launched as a way to help refugees get jobs in the tech world. (This was in the wake of the record 1.3 million asylum seekers that came to Europe in 2015.) The organization now operates four locations across Germany and works with over 600 companies to link DCI graduates to job opportunities. 

The Delivery Hero Tech Academy will teach coding languages (Java and Python are specifically called out), and the 9.5-months-long program is free to all participants. Those participants may also get an opportunity to move into a permanent position on a backend development team at Delivery Hero following the program. While that’s not a complete guarantee, participants presumably won’t be left out in the cold after graduation, either. DCI’s large network of partner companies will no doubt provide other potential opportunities.

A lack of diversity has long been a major problem in tech. Companies and leaders have made efforts in the form of diversity reports and pledges to do more, but critics have said these efforts will “ring hollow” until changes show up in diversity data.

At the same time, the restaurant industry is getting increasingly digitized thanks to the shift towards to-go orders (e.g., delivery) and digital ordering, payment, and management platforms. Theoretically, the switch could create not just more jobs in the industry but jobs that pay higher, are less dangerous, offer the kinds of challenges that make work fulfilling, and lead to new career opportunities down the line.

For many around the world, the above litany remains firmly out of reach. In fact, it’s more common for refugees, undocumented workers, and those with less formal education to wind up working the last mile of delivery. And if there’s one job type that’s the antithesis of safe, fulfilling work that pays well, it’s gig worker jobs like food delivery.

Restaurant tech companies have been saying for a couple years now that they don’t want their AI, automation, and robotic platforms to displace workers. Rather, they want that tech to take over the dirty, dangerous, and boring pieces of the restaurant so that human workers can focus on the proverbial “more meaningful” tasks. So far, few have defined what “meaningful” is in this technocentric restaurant world, or how one manages to acquire the skills to get there.

Until now, that is. By helping to provide he education needed to get into the tech part of restaurant tech, Delivery Hero is addressing an area that’s until now not really been talked about. Let’s hope the Tech Academy can start to change that, and inspire other restaurant tech companies to do the same.

More Headlines

Too Good To Go Expands Its Food Waste App Nationally Across the U.S.: The company announced its plans to expand service for its food-waste-fighting platform across the United States, following a successful program in select East Coast states.

Foodetective Raises $2M in Seed Funding: Switzerland-based Foodetective raised funds for its B2B software, which is an operations platform restaurants can use to organize and run their many disparate pieces of software and view them from a single dashboard.

Over Half of U.S. Consumers Are Comfortable Dining in Restaurants: More than half of U.S. consumers (60 percent), are comfortable with the idea of dining out at a restaurant, according to new data from tech intelligence firm Morning Consult. 

Food Tech Show Live: Shake Shack, Delivery Bots & Cultivated Meat

Listeners of the Food Tech Show podcast know that in addition to our regular interviews with smart leaders in the food tech space, we also like to get together once a week on the podcast to talk about the top stories in food tech.

And now, this weekly wrapup includes a live studio audience (kind of) on Clubhouse. Like many other food tech and future food nerds, we’ve been having lots of fun over on the social audio app, and one of the best parts is the live interaction with listeners.

If you’re on Clubhouse, make sure to join us weekly every Friday at 1 Pacific on Clubhouse by following the Food Tech Live club. Here’s the link to this coming Friday’s show so make sure to add it to your calendar.

But before you do that, you’ll want to check out last week’s show (with special guest commentator Zoe Leavitt). The stories we discuss on Friday include:

If you’d like to listen to our latest news wrapup, you can do so now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just by clicking play below.

Bizero Rolls Out Delivery Robots to Help Prevent Driver Deaths in Turkey

There are lots of reasons that delivery robot companies launch their services. Faster food deliveries. A attempt to make delivery more available. One of the main reasons Bizero launched its robot delivery service in Istanbul, Turkey was to help prevent the rampant death of delivery drivers there.

Mehmet Akincilar, Founder of Bizero told me by video chat this week that delivery driver deaths in Turkey is a big problem and that he wanted to deploy his robots to help. According an article in the Turkish publication, Duvar from Feb 2020, “75 of the 103 motorcyclists who died in traffic accidents were delivery drivers” (the publication did not specify where in Turkey or a specific timeframe).

Additionally, the Duvar post said:

While it is estimated that 100,000 motorcyclist delivery drivers are currently working in Turkey, at least 50,000 are believed to be working under the table. Those working informally get paid less, and usually these workers are immigrants or high school students on summer break. While a delivery driver can make between 150-200 TL a day, immigrants and drivers without licenses are paid only 50-60 TL a day

This is where Bizero comes. Akincilar and his team are using self-balancing two-wheeled robots, dubbed PIKA (“Paylaşımlı İnsansız Kargo Aracı,” or “Shared Unmanned Cargo Vehicle”), to make food deliveries in Istanbul. The robots aren’t currently the most high-tech robots we’ve covered (they use an actual padlock on the cargo door and recipients are texted the combination), but they appear to get the job done.

Delivery Robot carries greengrocery at Turkish Bazaar, Istanbul | Bizero cooperation w/Pazardan App

The PIKAs have a range of 100 kilometers on a charge, can carry 30 kgs worth of stuff, and have a maximum speed of 10 kmh. Bizero’s robots are semi-autonomous, so there is a human pilot that plots the course for the robot (they are not fully driven by teleoperators). One person can pilot up to five robots at a time. This also means that robots won’t fully replace humans in the workforce, as some drivers can move into working as robot teleoperators.

The program was launched last July, and Bizero has 10 robots making deliveries around Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Akincilar says that the company will have 100 robots making deliveries by the end of this year (and that they will have digital locks).

Bizero’s business model is to sell the robots outright. There is no subscription or per mile fee, just selling robots to delivery services, restaurants, markets, etc. Pricing was not disclosed.

Bizero is actually the second delivery robot company operating in Istanbul right now. Delivers AI uses four-wheeled autonomous ‘bots and also plans to have a fleet of 100 robots making deliveries in a year’s time. Unlike Delivers AI, however, Bizero is bootstrapped.

Given the mortality issues with delivery drivers in Turkey, having more robots making deliveries in Turkey seems like a good thing.

Imperium Drive Comes Out of Stealth with Bandwidth-Aware Teleoperation for Robots

One of the many questions facing delivery robot startups as they come to market is how much autonomy to give the robots. Should they go full autonomous driving, even though that is more technically complex and there is still a patchwork of regulation that needs to be dealt with? Or should they go with less autonomy and use humans to help guide or even drive their robots to sidestep some of the complications that come with self-driving vehicles.

For robot delivery startups wrestling with these questions, Imperium Drive says it’s here to help. Based in Europe (the company is scattered across different countries because of the pandemic) and part of the TechStars Smart Mobility cohort, Imperium Drive makes a teleoperation system for autonomous vehicles, including the small rover robots favored by the likes of Starship, Kiwibot, Postmates and others.

Imperium does the whole teleoperation stack, from the software onboard the robot to the human on the other end who helps the robot navigate. Imperium lets robot companies choose how much teleoperation they want, depending on their robot’s level of autonomy. Imperium can have a human simply monitor the robot remotely in case it gets stuck or runs into trouble, or the company can plot points on a map for the robot to autonomously follow. At the far end of the spectrum, Imperium can have a human actually drive the delivery robot remotely, like a videogame.

Imperium Drive Co-Founder and CEO, Koosha Kaveh, told me by phone this week that his company’s secret sauce is its ability to operate even when network connections provide only low bandwidth. As the robot runs around town, the strength of its cellular connection will vary, sometimes offering very small pipes for data to get through.

“We’ve developed our own AI predictive engine that predicts changes of network parameters,” said Kaveh, “And we change automatically our streaming engine based on availability.”

A easy way to think about Imperium’s bandwidth technology is Netflix. The movie streaming service will detect how much bandwidth you have (e.g., a cellular connection versus wired Ethernet) and serve a movie in a resolution fit for that situation. Imperium does the same thing, just with data from the robot.

Delivery robots are actually streaming a lot of data back to their headquarters. There’s video from the robot’s on-board cameras as well as lidar and radar information. Imperium adapts what is streamed based on the amount of bandwidth. For example, if there’s very little bandwidth, Imperium can send just wireframes of the robots surroundings. Kaveh said that it can stream the relevant information a teleoperator needs at under 1MB of data.

The idea of teleoperating robots brings up the question of scale. It’s easy to understand self-driving robots scaling up to meet demand because that’s the whole point — there is no human labor to pay. Once you have the robots, they can just run around the clock with no additional cost. What happens to the economics when you have a human handling a robot?

Kaveh says Imperium has a network of inexpensive labor in Eastern Europe that it can tap into to teleoperate robots. And Imperium isn’t alone in using humans to guide robots. Kiwibot has a team of people in Colombia that plots the courses for its robots (not full-on driving). And Tortoise skipped the idea of self-driving altogether for its robots, believing it can create a Mechanical Turk style army of human gig-work teleoperators.

The fact that Imperium Drive exists is at least some indication that the delivery robot space is maturing. As we outlined in our Delivery Robot Market Report, there are many companies around the world deploying delivery robots on city streets. Imperium Drive is part of a typical business cycle for new market categories like delivery bots. It’s not creating the robots themselves, but adding a layer to make those robots run more efficiently. As robots gain traction, we’ll see more third-party add-ons like this meant to improve robot delivery operations.

Report: Uber Looking to Spin Off Postmates X Delivery Robot Biz

As part of its acquisition of Postmates last year, Uber got into the delivery robot business. Now, according to a report in TechCrunch, Uber is planning to get out of the robo-biz by spinning off Postmates X (the robotics division of the company) into a separate company.

From TechCrunch:

Postmates X, the robotics division of the on-demand delivery startup that Uber acquired last year for $2.65 billion, is seeking investors in its bid to become a separate company, according to several people familiar with the plans.

The new spinout is being called Serve Robotics, named after the companies’ autonomous, cooler-sized Serve robot, which was making deliveries in Los Angeles throughout much of 2020. More recently, Postmates Serve was enlisted by the Pink Dot market to make deliveries in West Hollywood.

TechCrunch reports that Serve Robotics would retain the IP and assets, and Uber would keep a 25 percent stake in the company.

Given how the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing restaurants and grocers to adopt more contactless delivery methods, it may seem like an odd time for Uber to get out of the delivery robot business.

As we’ve been chronicling, autonomous delivery robots are popping up all over the globe. Starship has been doing deliveries on college campuses for more than a year, and expanded to grocery delivery in Modesto, CA. Kiwibot partnered with the City of San Jose for robot restaurant deliveries there. Then there’s Yandex in Russia, Delivers AI in Turkey, and Woowa Brothers in Seoul, South Korea.

But as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.

While the use of robotics is definitely on the rise around the world, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before they become mainstream. Regulations and production scale are two biggies. Right now there are a patchwork of rules around autonomous delivery that vary from city to city and state to state. Even as those get ironed out, scaling robots to a number where we see them across the country is still a huge undertaking.

Uber pushing those issues off on to a separate company means Uber can focus more on its own delivery and ridesharing businesses. Uber can then just license the robot technology to facilitate its food delivery.

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.

Refraction’s “Goldilocks” Size Could Make it Pretty Great for Robot Grocery Delivery

Contactless delivery as a concept, didn’t exist prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The phrase describes the way of delivering food and other goods without humans having to interact with or touch one another.

Delivery robots hold the promise of taking contactless delivery one step further, by removing humans from the equation altogether. Over in Ann Arbor, MI, Refraction.ai launched its robot fleet for restaurant lunch delivery earlier this year, and this month started piloting a grocery delivery service.

Refraction builds the REV-1, an autonomous three-wheeled delivery robot that is ruggedized so that it can handle inclement weather. The company has eight robots rolling through a 3.5 mile radius around Ann Arbor right now making deliveries , with another 15 robots being manufactured.

I first came across Refraction’s grocery work in a WIRED article about the delivery fees Refraction was charging. So I hopped on the phone with Refraction Co-Founder, Ram Vasudevan, to find out more about its grocery program and catch up with the company.

According to Vasudevan, Refraction has partnered with a local grocery store called the Produce Station and has another grocery partner coming online soon. The program is currently being tested and is not yet open to the public, but for now, customers are directed to a special website created by Refraction where they can shop online for food items just as they would from any retailer. A robot is dispatched to the store where a worker there packs it with the order (a REV-1 can hold six grocery bags). The robot is then sent off to the house for delivery with a text message alerting the shopper when the robot has arrived.

The Refraction robot isn’t completely contactless, however. Recipients still need to touch the robot to unlock it, something Vasudevan says the company is working on. Refraction is also looking to add UV lights to the cargo cavity to help with sanitization.

Refraction isn’t the only company that is doing robotic food delivery. Starship’s cooler-sized robots have been doing grocery delivery in Milton Keynes, England, and are now doing restaurant delivery in U.S. cities like Tempe, AZ and Fairfax, VA. And Nuro was given the greenlight by California to start testing its autonomous pod vehicles, which about half the size of a regular car, for deliveries as well.

But one advantage Refraction’s robot may have is its “Goldilocks”-like size. It stands five feet tall and is narrow enough to travel in the bike lanes on roads . This could potentially make it more friendly to city regulators who don’t want their sidewalks clogged with robots. It could also prove more attractive than a pod, because the robot can skooch off to the side to make way for traffic, and have an easier time finding enough space to park.

Vasudevan said that Refraction was “overwhelmed” with interest from restaurants when it launched that delivery option earlier this year. As the company moves past the testing phase, it’s going to have quite a bit of contact with grocers as well.