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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery robots

LG and Woowa Bros. to Develop Food Delivery and Serving Robots

South Korean companies LG and Woowa Brothers announced today that they will work together on developing robots that deliver food to tables at restaurants as well as to your front door (hat tip to The Investor).

The companies didn’t provide many specifics, just saying that there were synergies between the two and they looked forward to making a better world where robots and humans coexist.

The move isn’t surprising given that both companies have made numerous robotic moves in parallel up to this point. Just earlier this month South Korean restaurant chain CJ Foodville started deploying LG’s CLoi ServeBots at its locations to serve food and shuttle empty dishes.

For its part Woowa Brothers, which operates Baedal Minjok, South Korea’s largest food delivery operation, launched a robot rental program for restaurants in November of last year. And last summer, Woowa partnered with UCLA to develop cooking robots. Woowa was acquired by Delivery Hero for $4 billion last December, but prior to that, Woowa’s CEO had talked openly about how delivery robots should be multi-taskers and do things like take away trash and recycling.

The announcement comes amid the backdrop of the deadly coronavirus. Cases in South Korea have spiked, and as the disease becomes a global pandemic, robots are one measure being taken to reduce human-to-human contact. As we saw early in the virus’ spread, a quarantined hotel in China used robots to serve food to stranded travelers. In fact, robots could wind up being instrumental in the contactless method of food delivery, if proper sterilization procedures can be put into place.

LG certainly isn’t alone in its food robot endeavors. Sony has a big vision for cooking robots and partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to research them. Sony also recently launched a dedicated artificial intelligence unit that would work on “gastronomy.”

All of this is to say that with the intense focus from companies like LG, Woowa, Sony and more, the world of food delivery and restaurant robots is being primed to undergo massive advancements in the coming years.

Legal Considerations Before Deploying Autonomous Delivery Robots

The following is a guest post written by Ariel Yehezkel and Allison Wu Troianos of the law firm Sheppard Mullin.

With e-commerce consumer expectations constantly rising with the ubiquity of same-day delivery, startups and established corporations alike are focusing on developing and investing in efficient last-mile delivery and e-commerce fulfillment solutions. Specifically, online grocery retail is one of the most rapidly growing e-commerce sectors for home delivery, with a projected 70 percent of consumers purchasing their groceries online and a market value of $100 billion within the next two to four years. Consequently, there is also a trend towards acquisition activity focused on disrupting and supplementing traditional logistics systems and developing technologies that facilitate various aspects of the direct-to-consumer grocery supply chain as corporations seek to secure a foothold in the market.

Several companies are using sorting robots in warehouses to assist in order fulfillment and other companies have been using and developing autonomous delivery robots that facilitate the last-mile logistics of direct-consumer-delivery.

With these technological developments come novel legal questions that potential acquirers or investors that develop and manufacture delivery robots and that use robotic systems in warehouses need to consider.  Such legal considerations include tort liability, privacy and data protection issues and regulatory concerns regarding traffic and motorized vehicle laws.

Tort law in many legal systems would impose liability on the person or entity in control of a device that causes damage. Therefore, liability in the event of a traffic accident or other tortious activity caused by a delivery robot would likely fall on the company that was controlling or steering the delivery robot at the time of the incident. Further, the designer or manufacturer of a delivery robot that injures a pedestrian or damages property could also be held liable under the theory of strict product liability if an injured party alleged that the robot was dangerous due to a defect in their manufacturing or design. Under a strict product liability theory, such injured party could argue that a reasonable person would not expect a small robot autonomously operating on the sidewalk without a conspicuous design feature such as a flag, which in turn creates unlawfully dangerous situations for pedestrians or drivers.

However, traditional civil liability frameworks may not be sufficient enough to address the potential issues that may arise from accidents or damage caused by delivery robots. The level of autonomy of robots and the level of influence humans have over their operation could affect how liability is allocated, as current tort laws assume human involvement in the operation of robots. As innovations enable robots to become more autonomous, current liability frameworks may not be able to adequately assign liability because the more autonomous a robot is, the less it can be treated simply as a tool of a human user.  It is yet to be seen how legal frameworks will evolve to account for liability arising from damage caused by autonomous delivery robots, but they will necessarily need to adapt as technological advances make it possible for robots to operate without as much human control or oversight.

Privacy and data protection issues could be implicated due to delivery robots using camera recording and collecting other consumer data through the delivery process. Certain federal, state and local laws restrict and regulate data collection and retention, so companies must be aware of all relevant data protection regulations and make sure any data delivery robots collect is handled in compliance with such regulations.

For example, the collection of personal data is restricted and regulated under certain data protection laws, which would include any information relating to an identifiable natural person. An individual may need to be given with notice or be required to give consent if their personal data will be collected, and the controller of such collected data would be the principal party responsible for compliance with the applicable privacy law. Any personal data collected and transmitted by a delivery robot, including the consumer’s address and biographical data, and any pictures, video or audio recordings, would need to be stored and processed in compliance with applicable privacy laws.

Certain local and state regulations regarding motor vehicles will also need to adapt to accommodate autonomous delivery robots, especially if they operate in public traffic. States have been adopting statutes permitting delivery robots up to a certain weight limit to operate on sidewalks and crosswalks. Starship Technologies, a leading company in the robot delivery space, has been actively involved in getting legislation passed in various states such as Virginia and Idaho. Starship has been advocating for proposals that allow Starship’s robots to operate, but that would exclude some of its competitors’ products from autonomous operation due to weight limits or other restrictions. Starship has demonstrated its robots in hearings for these proposed bills, which set forth the parameters for legal operation of these delivery robots, such as restricting their weight, requiring robots to have their own insurance and requiring a certain level of human monitoring, which could implicate some of the data privacy or liability issues discussed above.

Though several states have adopted such legislation, densely populated urban areas have been slower to follow suit. It could be quite some time before some large cities such as New York City pass legislation allowing delivery robots to operate in their streets and sidewalks.  Reportedly, when a same-day delivery robot appeared in Manhattan in November 2019, New York City officials promptly issued a cease and desist order, claiming that the delivery robots violated vehicle and traffic laws that prohibit self-driving cars and motor vehicles on sidewalks, and citing job loss and traffic congestion as their main concerns. Other critics cite accessibility and safety issues, asserting that the delivery robots pose undue obstacles to the disability community and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The growth in the autonomous delivery space has been exponential over the last several years and is expected to continue to grow as home grocery delivery becomes the standard. The legal considerations raised above are not necessarily roadblocks to further autonomous delivery innovation, but compliance with all relevant regulations and potential liability concerns should be taken into account as companies continue their foray into the autonomous delivery space and as investors continue to invest and acquire such companies. 

Ariel Yehezkel is the Practice Group Leader of Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate practice group. Allison Wu Troianos is an associate in the firm’s Corporate practice group. They regularly handle transactions in food and beverage industry, and have developed extensive knowledge in this sector. They can be reached at ayehezkel@sheppardmullin.com and atroianos@sheppardmullin.com, respectively.

Starship Delivery Robots Officially Roll Out (Again) at University of Pittsburgh

As of this week, robot-powered food and drink delivery are fully a part of college life at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). After several months of testing (and stopping tests), Pitt now has a fleet of 30 Starship robots autonomously running around campus feeding hungry students and staff.

To get the robot, users order from seven participating campus eateries through the Starship deliveries app. For a $1.99 fee, a cooler-sized robot will wheel across campus to bring the food directly to the person.

Starship’s robots made their debut on Pitt’s campus last September, but the program was temporarily halted just a month later after two separate incidents of the self-driving robots reportedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

Pitt pulled Starship’s robots off campus for further review. We reached out to Starship to see what adjustments the company made in response to the accessibility incidents and a company spokesperson responded with a terse “Starship reviewed the mapping of that intersection.”

The real world will bring about all sorts of issues for delivery robots that weren’t necessarily foreseeable, and they are issues that society will have to deal with and figure out in real time. But robots will become an increasingly common part of the college experience for students over the next couple of years. In addition to Pitt, Starship’s robots are making deliveries at George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Wisconsin, and other homes of higher education. Elsewhere, Chowbotics has been sending its Sally, the salad making robot, off to a number of different colleges to feed students around the clock.

Though autonomous robot delivery at colleges is very much still in its infancy, it has the power to be a real game changer. The ability to order food on demand and have it brought directly to you wherever you are on campus in undeniably convenient (post-party pizza, anyone?). But it’s also training an entire generation of early tech adopters (read: the youngs) to interact with robots, and perhaps, expect them once they leave school.

How Will Winter Affect Autonomous Delivery Robots? Snow Problem!

A lot of work in autonomous robots is done in places like Scottsdale, Houston and the Bay Area. What places like Scottsdale, Houston and the Bay Area have in common is that they have mild-to-nonexistant winters. But up north in Michigan and Wisconsin, where it’s already snowing, autonomous delivery bots from Refraction AI and Starship are being put to the test.

Refraction is based out of Ann Arbor, MI, and it’s three-wheeled REV-1 robot has been designed to travel in bad weather. As we wrote around the time of its launch:

…Refraction AI combines software and hardware to battle bad weather. First is the environmental scanning provided by a 12-camera setup as well as ultrasound and radar sensors on the REV-1. To make the robot less expensive, the REV-1 foregoes the LIDAR systems popular with other autonomous robots. And according to Johnson-Roberson, Refraction AI’s camera rig also allows the robot to track things not on the ground like buildings and cars to navigate even when road lines are not visible. The other way the REV-1 takes on bad weather is rather low tech. “We’re using fat bike tires a low PSI so they are squishy,” said Johnson-Roberson. “They can run in snow and rain.”

But it’s one thing to describe how a robot will work in inclement weather; it’s another to see it in action. Thankfully, the folks at Refraction shot a video of its robot on a snow-covered road a couple of weeks back and shared it with The Spoon. Check it out:

Refraction.AI’s REV-1 (Pity the cyclist following it)

While that video doesn’t show it taking turns or hills, or having to deal with traffic, it certainly looks like the REV-1 can handle slushy conditions. Which is actually good news all around. Barring the arrival of a blizzard, hungry folks can order meals for delivery guilt-free because they aren’t forcing someone to drive or ride in the snow, and restaurants can still earn delivery revenue when the weather turns.

Elsewhere in the midwest, the students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are just now learning whether or not that town’s snowy weather will keep the newly arrived Starship robots from making food deliveries. The Wisconsin State Journal’s Just Ask Us section fielded this question this week: Will UW-Madison’s food delivery robots get stuck in the snow?

The answer was pretty straightforward and filled with the type of common sense you’d expect from a Midwesterner:

On days when there are blizzards or icy conditions that would make the sidewalks unnavigable for people, the delivery robots will not operate. When students go on the app to order food, it would show that the marketplaces are closed

A spokesperson for the university goes on to say that since the robots were designed with a low-profile and traction tires that could handle Estonian weather, they should be able to handle a Wisconsin winter. (If you go to UWM, send us a photo or video of the robot in snowy action).

The weather outside may be frightful, but putting robots through these harsh weather paces means that they’ll be available in more places beyond Houston, Phoenix and the Bay Area in the near future.

Woowa Bros. to Rent Out In-Restaurant Bots that Deliver Food to Your Table

When we’ve written about Korean company Woowa Bros.’ robotic ambitions in the past, it’s been around delivering food from restaurants to your customers’ own homes. But the company announced a new plan on Monday to have its Dilly ‘bots deliver food inside restaurants to your table, too.

The Aju Business Daily reports that Woowa is launching a robot rental program wherein restaurants can pay 900,000 won (~$773 USD) per month with a two-year contract.

Aju Business Daily is light on details, saying only that the Dilly can carry food to four tables at a time and bus dirty dishes back to the kitchen. That sounds a lot like the Penny robot Bear Robotics offers (and tested out at a Pizza Hut in Seoul last year). Woowa is an investor in Bear Robotics, and we’ve reached out to Bear’s to see if its technology is involved in Woowa’s new offering.

As off-premises dining continues to play an increasingly important role for restaurants, many players look to build autonomous robots for food delivery (Postmates, Kiwi, Starship, etc.). There aren’t as many focused on in-store dining, which presents an opportunity for companies like Woowa and Bear.

Woowa Brothers operates the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery app in South Korea, and the company has not been shy about building out its robot fleet. Last December the company received a $320 million investment round in part to help it develop more autonomous robots, and this past July the company formed a partnership with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots.

Russia’s Yandex Gets Into the Delivery Bot Game

Russia-based company Yandex announced this week that it’s rolling out its own autonomous delivery robot. Dubbed the Yandex.Rover, it’s a squat, six-wheeled cooler-sized robot that can scoot around at a walking pace, delivering packages and food.

Yandex is often referred to as the Russian Google. According to the press announcement, its Rover has already hit the road at the company’s headquarters in Moscow. Similar to other delivery robots like those from Starship and Kiwi, the Yandex.Rover uses lidar and can travel autonomously (with remote supervision), recognize objects, and avoid pedestrians, animals and other obstacles.

Synergy is the name of the game for the Yandex.Rover, as it will eventually be put to use delivering meals from Yandex.Eats, groceries from Yandex.Lavka and goods from the online marketplace Beru.

At first blush, the Yandex.Rover is probably most analogous to Amazon’s Scout rover bot. Scout is currently being tested in Washington state and California for small package deliveries from Amazon. While the company hasn’t made any specific announcements, it’s not hard to imagine the Scout bot being used for food delivery from Whole Foods, Amazon Go or the eventual Amazon-branded supermarket chain.

Other autonomous delivery robots like the aforementioned Starship and Kiwi are focusing on providing food delivery to college campuses, though there is some general expansion into cities such as Sacramento.

Robots like these could drastically alter the food delivery landscape in terms of how people get their meals. Here in the U.S. at least, there are still a number of legal and infrastructure hurdles that need to be overcome before they ever become commonplace. I’m not familiar with the regulatory world of Russia, it’s hard to say if Yandex will face similar scrutiny.

Starship Delivery Robots Heading for the University of Houston

You can add the University of Houston to the growing list of colleges and universities that will have Starship‘s small delivery robots scurrying around its campus this coming school year. According to ABC 13 University of Houston (UH) president Renu Khator made the announcement during her fall address.

Starting this fall, students will be able to order and have food delivered to their location on the UH campus via Starship’s squat, six-wheeled, cooler sized robots. We don’t have a ton of details about the program, such as whether Starship has partnered with a foodservice operator like Sodexo to enable meal delivery from campus restaurants that ties into student meal plans. We reached out to Starship for more information.

News of the UH expansion comes after Starship raised a $40 million Series A round of funding this summer. Starship has also been accelerating it college campus program in the back half of this year. The company kicked off 2019 by making deliveries at George Mason University in January. It then added Northern Arizona University in March and the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University in August. In September The Harvard Crimson reported that students there were working to bring Starship robots to its campus, too.

College campuses are proving to be fertile ground for food robots. In addition to Starship, Kiwi makes its own delivery rover bots for colleges like the University of California at Berkeley. And Chowbotics has sent Sally, its salad-making robot, off to multiple colleges this year. Colleges make a lot of sense for robots, as they have concentrated populations of students, faculty and staff that are around at all hours and automated food systems can work around the clock to make or deliver food.

As robots enter more colleges and make more types of food available more often, sociologist departments on campus should watch how this automation changes an entire generation of students’ relationship with dining.

Newsletter: Are Vertical Farms Ready to Grow More Than Lettuce?

Greetings from the South, ground zero for sweet tea, land of unrelenting humidity, future home of a massive new vertical farming operation.

This week, an Orlando, FL-based company called Kalera (formerly Eco Convergence Group), announced that it has broken ground on a semi-autonomous vertical farming facility that will produce 5 million heads of lettuce each year, supplying Orlando and central Florida restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores with fresh greens and underscoring the growing demand for locally grown produce.

As soon as I got the news, the usual question about vertical farming entered my brain: why is it always lettuce? From Kalera’s new operation to AeroFarms’ 70,000-square-foot New Jersey farm to IGS’ fully automated vertical farm, we hear lots of talk of leafy greens, herbs, and the occasional edible flower. But nobody’s yet growing eggplant, potato, or even carrots.

Kalera’s CEO and cofounder, Cristian Toma, had a lot to say about that when I asked him about this: Unlike lettuce — short plants that can be densely packed together to maximize volume — many other types of produce need lots of space to grow upwards and outwards. In some cases they require multiple harvests. Most of them need human hands to assist with things like pruning, and all of these needs add up to the kinds of space and labor costs vertical farms simply can’t sustain right now. Not at scale, anyway.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see more non-leafy greens in vertical farms at some point in the future. As I noted this morning:

Whether the day ever comes when we’ll see vertical farms growing, say, carrots, depends a lot on developments in plant science in the future. “The varieties we are working with right now over many many years evolved to meet the challenges for outdoor production,” says Toma. “We don’t have varieties bred specifically for indoor production yet. So that’s an area where the industry can develop.”

Image courtesy of Princeton University

Princeton Vertical Farming Project Shutters Its Doors — For Now

More data on growing methods might help. That’s been the credo of Paul P.G. Gauthier, former associate research scholar in plant physiology and environmental plant metabolism at Princeton University and the founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project.

Unfortunately, word got out late last week that PVFP has closed its doors following Gauthier’s departure from the university. We shouldn’t shutter the conversation on his ideas, however, especially those around the use of data in vertical farms. Back in January, Gauthier told The Spoon that the vertical farming industry needs more data on best practices for growing plants that can be shared around the industry in a kind of open-source framework. More data on what’s working and what isn’t could give us a more realistic idea of whether, say, tomatoes are a realistic crop to grow at large scale or if they’re better off in a greenhouse setting.

Gauthier has taken a job as Professor of Plant Science at Delaware Valley University and said he hopes to reproduce the vertical farm model from Princeton on a larger scale, and that there’s a possibility of even reviving the PVFP at Princeton in the future.

Starship’s Autonomous Delivery Bots Land on Another Campus

While vertical farms move closer to automation, more automated delivery bots are also moving onto college campuses. Starship upped the number of food delivery robots this week by announcing that its bots have landed at the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University, joining campuses like George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, both of whom launched delivery programs with Starship earlier this year.

Starship is one of a few companies testing delivery programs with these small, wheeled bots. Kiwi, too, has bots on a number of campuses — including, possibly Purdue, a potential overlap that suggests campus is the next battleground for autonomous delivery. It is, after all, the perfect testing ground: as my colleague Chris Albrecht noted when he tested out a Kiwi earlier this year, college campuses are an ideal piloting ground for these companies: “Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night,” he wrote.

Personally, I’m waiting for the day a six-wheeled autonomous bot can deliver a hydroponically grown baked potato to my doorstep, but if the economics of vertical potato farms don’t pan out, I’d always settle for lettuce.

Stay cool,
Jenn

Newsletter: The New All-in-One Restaurant Tech Is Here, Digital Drive-Thru Goes Down Under

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I was in a local coffee shop recently and overheard a rep from a well-known POS company trying to sell his product to the shop’s manager. But for every feature he offered up (“It’ll manage payroll!” “It makes tipping easier!”), the cafe manager had more or less the same rebuttal: more tech would make more work for her staff.

I suspect this conversation is happening all over the world. Tech’s march on the restaurant industry is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily making life easier for restaurants. In a growing number of cases, too many digital tools actually make it harder to get work done, particularly as demands for delivery and mobile orders ramp up and those functions have to be integrated into an already chaotic workflow.

But this week, we got a different glimpse into the future of the digital restaurant — namely, one where disparate tech solutions are replaced by a single digital platform that can manage every corner of the restaurant, from the kitchen system in the back to the kiosk out front to the off-premises order on its way out for delivery.

At least, that’s what Brightloom hopes to launch to restaurants this fall. The newly rebranded company, formerly known as Eatsa, announced yesterday that it’s revamped its existing end-to-end restaurant tech platform, into which it’s also integrating Starbucks’ famed mobile technology.

This is a big deal because, while many products claim to be “all-in-one” restaurant management software packs that make it easier for restaurant owners and operators to manage the entire business, no one’s yet managed to seamlessly integrate the mobile aspect of business into their system.

And nobody does mobile like Starbucks. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s hard to deny the mega-chain’s dominance when it comes to offering fast, highly personalized order and pickup functions for customers. Brightloom’s soon-to-be-unveiled system will integrate the Starbucks mobile order, pay, and customer loyalty tech into its own system. We don’t yet know exactly what that will look like, but it will undoubtedly raise everyone’s standards around what restaurant-tech systems should be able to do and put pressure on others to make their offerings just as useful and less of a burden for restaurants to implement.

Good-bye, Crackly Speakerphone. Hello Digital Drive-Thru
Will all these digital developments render the crackly speaker at the drive-thru null and void? Probably, and sooner than we think.

While major QSRs like Dunkin’ and Starbucks have been implementing digital and mobile ordering into the drive-thru experience little by little over the last couple years, KFC took things a step further recently by announcing its first-ever drive-thru-only concept store.

The store, which is slated to open in November, will feature multiple drive-thru lanes dedicated to customers who have ordered their food via the KFC website or mobile app. The idea is to streamline the order process and cut down on how long it takes customers — or delivery drivers — to get their food. But again, it’s all about the implementation. KFC’s concept store could raise the bar on what QSRs are expected to deliver in terms of speed and quality. Or it could just be introducing another digital process that stresses workers out. We’ll know more when the pilot launches in November, in Australia.

Delivery Bots on the Rise
Or you could just let the restaurant come to you in the form of a roving bot. There’s a growing number of these devices delivering food from restaurant to customer, often on college campuses, which hold a lot of people in a relatively small geographic area.

But as my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out this week, Kiwi announced it will test its semi-autonomous delivery bots on the streets of Sacramento, CA this fall, which suggests we’re coming to a point where these li’l roving machines will start to become a more common sight on regular city sidewalks. Who needs drive-thru when you can have your meal brought to you by a cute little box on wheels? As Chris said, “it was pretty amazing to whip out my phone, order a burrito, have a robot fetch my lunch and bring it to my location.”

For now, roving delivery bots are probably not a priority for most restaurants’ overall digital solutions. But as all-in-one offerings like the Brightloom-Starbucks tech get more commonplace and digital ordering becomes routine for customers and workers alike, there may be room for most restaurants to accommodate a bot or two in their tech stack.

Kiwi Expanding its Robot Delivery to Sacramento in September

Kiwi continues to roll out its diminutive li’l food delivery robots to more cities, with plans to begin operations in Sacramento, CA in September.

CBS13 first reported the story last week. While CBS13 didn’t provide many details around the Sacramento program, what caught our eye about the report is that Kiwi is working on this latest expansion directly with the city, which wants to become an urban technology lab. Most of Kiwi’s expansion so far has been through universities. Kiwi started out at the University of California in Berkeley and announced plans to be in a dozen more schools starting this fall including Stanford, UC Davis, Purdue, Cornell, and NYU.

Starting with universities makes sense for the nascent technology as campuses provide a sizeable population in a limited geographic area. Typically campuses have or are surrounded by plenty of restaurants to feed hungry students and faculties, and using a robot could make delivering those meals more convenient. Going the campus route is a strategy also employed by Starship for its delivery robot and Robby’s mobile commerce robot.

For Kiwi, going through schools also provides an infrastructure for running delivery operations, as students will be running operations at each school. We don’t have a ton of details on those programs (like how any money is split) but students will be responsible for robot maintenance and deployments. We reached out to Kiwi to find out more information about how the Sacramento program will work and will update when we hear back.

Kiwi’s robots are “semi-autonomous,” as they still have human operators who monitor a robot’s route and drop GPS waypoints for the robot to follow. I used Kiwi earlier this year at Berkeley and it felt like ordering food from the future. Aside from one glitch, it was pretty amazing to whip out my phone, order a burrito, have a robot fetch my lunch and bring it to my location.

Kiwi will begin testing in Sacramento this fall and hopes to have a fleet of 50 robots running around the streets of the city at some point.

Refraction Launches Three-Wheeled Delivery Robot That’s Bigger Than a Rover, but Smaller Than a Car

When it comes to autonomous delivery robots, size matters. Full-sized self-driving cars can travel on most major roads and go long distances, but may not work well in dense, traffic-congested cities. Little rover robots are nimble enough to zip along on sidewalks, but have a pretty limited range.

Refraction AI, an autonomous robotics startup that just came out of stealth today, is looking to split the difference with its REV-1 delivery vehicle. The REV-1 is a three-wheeled vehicle that stands 5 feet tall, 4.5 feet long and 30 inches wide. It weighs 100 pounds and has a top speed of 15 mph (Starship’s small rover bots have a top speed of 10 mph). The inside holds roughly 16 cubic feet, which translates to four to five grocery bags. There’s also an on-board touchscreen customers use to enter a code to unlock the REV-1 to retrieve their goods once they arrive.

The REV-1 has a stopping distance of just 5 feet, and to navigate around humans and other objects, Refraction has forsaken LIDAR used by other robots for a system combining 12 cameras with radar and ultrasound sensors. Refraction says that its LIDAR-less setup will allow it to travel better in inclement weather.

The REV-1’s in-between size and speed allow it to travel on both the roadway and in bike lanes, which, Refraction says, will open up new delivery route possibilities. And by not using LIDAR, Refraction can keep the cost of the REV-1 to $5,000 (though, LIDAR is getting cheaper).

Refraction AI introduces the REV-1

Refraction is based in Ann Arbor, MI, and is the brainchild of University of Michigan professors Matthew Johnson-Roberson and Ram Vasudevan. The company is backed by eLab Ventures and Trucks Venture Capital and will start with restaurant food delivery before expanding into other last-mile logistics.

Refraction is certainly launching at the right time as delivery robots are hot right now. Starship and Kiwi‘s rovers are spreading across college campuses in the U.S. Udelv is piloting self-driving cargo vehicles with grocers like Farmstead and HEB. And Domino’s is testing Nuro’s pod-like autonomous low-speed vehicles for pizza delivery as well.

The REV-1’s form factor is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it might be easier for lawmakers to deal with as they make up rules around self-driving vehicles. The small(ish) size of the REV-1, the fact that it’s not on sidewalks and its small stopping distance could make it easier for regulators to allow it on the road (as opposed to full-sized, full-speed self-driving cars). Additionally, its ability to use bike lanes could make it faster than other robot options in urban and suburban environments.

It also seems like robot delivery won’t be a zero-sum game. Restaurants and grocery stores will probably need access to a number of different types of self-driving robots (and drones) depending on where they are delivering to: Rovers for around the block, REV-1’s for a little bit further out, and cars for across town.

Self-Driving Uber Bikes Could be a Boon for its Food Delivery Biz

You know that phrase “you see what you look for?” I am knee-deep in that right now. As we put together The Spoon’s first conference on food robotics and automation happening in April, I see robots everywhere.

Case in point: news via The Telegraph that Uber is hiring a “micromobility robotics” team to develop self-driving scooters and bicycles. The obvious reason to build a team like this, as The Telegraph points out, is to develop scooters and bikes that could “drive themselves to charging points, potentially removing the need for costly contractors paid to collect them.”

Occam’s Razor tells us that this straightforward answer is probably the correct one, but since I’ve got food-realated robots on the brain, my first thought was something bigger and more delivery minded.

I’ve written before that I think Uber’s electric Jump bicycles could be a sleeping giant in the urban food world, particularly for restaurant food delivery. Uber Eats drivers on nimble e-bikes could quickly make multiple deliveries in dense cities because they wouldn’t have to deal with traffic, parking, and all the other headaches that come from driving an actual car in a city. And having an e-bike means more speed and a potentially smoother ride for your fries.

But what if the self-driving Uber bike didn’t just find its way back to a charging spot, but instead went from a nearby restaurant to a customer’s door? Instead of your standard two-wheeler, it might be easier to imagine something more akin to Kiwi’s self-driving trike. Kiwi’s trike carries smaller delivery rover robots, but an Uber version could just be outfitted with compartments to hold food that consumers unlock when the trike pulls up.

In addition to being quick on car-congested streets, self-driving delivery bikes might be easier for cities to accept (read: regulate). Bikes aren’t a new type of vehicle for lawmakers to grok (like self-driving pods), they are low-speed and don’t take up much room.

Delivery bikes/trikes could even be an incentive for restaurants to partner with Uber on virtual kitchens. A restaurant that leased their own, dedicated Uber delivery trike could get better promotion in the Uber Eats marketplace for their real or virtual establishment.

Like I said, I’m basically a cyborg right now assembling our Articulate conference in April (you should get tickets!), so I’m always dreaming of electric delivery sheep. But the idea of Uber creating self-driving bikes and then using them for other parts of the business is something anyone could see happening.