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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery robots

South Korea’s Woowa Bros. Gets $320M Investment to Build More Robots

South Korean company Woowa Bros., which runs the Baedal Minjok food delivery app, announced yesterday that it has received a $320 million from Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital and GIC. This brings the total amount raised by Woowa to $482.8 million.

According to Reuters, Woowa says it will use the new funding to expand internationally and, (more excitingly, from my perspective) develop more autonomous delivery robots like its Dilly (pictured above).

Robots are so hot right now, and there’s a wave of li’l rover bots that will be hitting the streets next year. In addition to players like Kiwi, Starship and Marble, Postmates recently introduced its own delivery robot. Postmates is actually the most apt comparison as both Woowa and Postmates offer delivery businesses. Adding robot transport to their existing businesses gives them more control of deliveries further up the stack.

As I wrote back in July, Kim Bong-jin, CEO and Founder of Korean company Woowa Brothers is actually quite thoughtful and forward thinking when it comes to delivery ‘bots. In addition to making delivery cheaper and more secure, Bong-jin wants Woowa robots to double up their work. In addition to dropping off food, the robots would then take back your recycling. Taking that one step further, it’s not too hard to imagine restaurants employing re-usable food containers that could be retrieved, cleaned and loaded up with another delivery meal to cut down on waste.

Woowa isn’t just interested in delivery robots. Earlier this year, the company invested $2 million in Bear Robotics, which makes Penny the front of house restaurant robot. Penny got a job shuttling food and empty dishes at Seoul Pizza Hut location, and was a big hit on-stage at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

Kiwi Explains Delivery Bot Fire, How Badly Will the Blaze Burn the Startup?

Like a Spinal Tap drummer, one of Kiwi‘s delivery robots caught fire last Friday while out and about on the campus of UC Berkeley. While no human was harmed during the conflagration, this isn’t great news for the nascent startup, which has just started working to expand to other locations.

According to the Daily Californian, at around 2 p.m. on this past Friday, a Kiwi delivery bot caught fire outside the UC Berkeley Martin Luther King Student Union. Of course, video of the incident was posted to social media, like the one below (caution some swearing):

Berkeley CA KiwiBot caught on fire

Over the weekend, Kiwi posted an update to its corporate blog, explaining what happened:

We learned that the root cause was human error when replacing the batteries, where a defective battery was put in place of a functioning one. This caused an exceedingly rare occurrence of the battery experiencing thermal runaway.

The company says it has put in custom software to “rigorously monitor the state of each battery.”

While there’s never a good time for a company’s product to catch fire, the events of the past weekend come as delivery robots are just starting to roll out in different markets and at a time when Kiwi is working to extend its service to other campuses. At the end of October, Kiwi started making deliveries in Westwood, CA, home of UCLA. At the time, the company could not make deliveries on campus as it was still sorting out permits. Having your robot burst into flames on a different college campus certainly won’t make getting those permits any easier.

City governments are still figuring out how to deal with and regulate little cooler-sized robots driving themselves around city sidewalks and interacting with pedestrians and traffic. San Francisco placed stringent rules around how commercial robots could be used in the city. Dallas, TX started a six month trial using Marble robots, but they can only be used in select areas.

The Kiwi fire also, unfortunately, comes not that long after California suffered horrible wildfires. While Kiwi operates in urban settings, there could be some residual anxiety over introducing any type of new, still-being-tested-in-the-real-world autonomous vehicle that has a public instance of spontaneously catching fire.

Before we try to bury Kiwi, let’s remember that this isn’t the first time batteries have been a bane to our modern existence. At the start of this year, HP had to recall 50,000 lithium-ion laptop batteries over fire risk.

Robots will play an increasingly important role in how we get our meals, groceries and other goods, and while the Kiwi fire isn’t ideal, the company was quick to respond publicly to the issue and outline the steps it’s taking to remedy the situation.

While it got burned, Kiwi got lucky. This could have been much, much worse for the company. Thankfully no one was injured and no major property was damaged. Hopefully this minor incident will have not just Kiwi, but others like Marble and Starship, revisiting their own robots to make sure it won’t happen again.

Postmates Debuts its own Bright-Eyed Delivery Robot

You know what you can look forward to in 2019? More robots (but more on that in a later post). Case in point: delivery service Postmates announced today that it has developed its own autonomous delivery rover that will be hitting sidewalks next year.

Dubbed Serve, the li’l robot is a bright yellow square-shaped box with big lighted eyes on four wheels, and was built in-house by Postmates’ R&D department. According to press materials, Serve:

  • Uses an array of sensors, including Lidar
  • Can carry 50 pounds
  • Goes 30 miles on a single charge
  • Has an interactive touchscreen with a camera
  • Communicates through dynamic lighting in its eyes and a light ring on top to signal a change in direction when moving

Postmates says that in addition to delivery directly to consumers, “Serve can work in congested city centers and bring food/goods from several merchants to one centralized location where our fleet of drivers, bikers and even walkers can take those batched goods and complete the delivery in a more efficient way.”

While Postmates said that Serve will be, err, rolled out in Los Angeles, the company was mum on further details about how many robots will be deployed, as well as when they will be deployed, other than saying over the next twelve months.

Will having its own robots help Postmates stand out in the crowded world of food delivery? More than $3.5 billion has been invested in food delivery startups alone this year. For its part, Postmates has raised $578 million, but rival DoorDash has raised $971 million, and has used robots from Marble for delivery before, and, FWIW, was looking to produce more “moonshots” like robots in-house.

Speaking of Marble, it’s worth noting that Postmates decided to build its own robot rather than partner with a third-party like Kiwi or Starship or Marble. Kiwi is making deliveries in Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, while Starship is now delivering packages and goods on campuses in Silicon Valley and groceries the U.K. Without seeing any numbers, the cost associated with maintaining a fleet of ‘bots must have looked more attractive than sharing or adding to delivery fees with an outside robot provider.

Postmates’ Serve may be the last food robot-related announcement we get this year, but it’s just the beginning of the robot news sure to come in 2019. (Seriously, stay tuned for a post on that!)

Woowa Brothers CEO: Delivery Robots Should Take Your Recycling Too

When we talk about delivery robots, it’s often a one-way transaction: a robot delivering food (or whatever) to a customer. But KimBong-jin, CEO and Founder of Korean company Woowa Brothers, thinks the convenience is two-way, with robots taking items like recycling away from the customer.

Woowa Brothers owns Baedal Minjok: the top food delivery app in Korea, where 7 in 10 people have used a food delivery app. In an interview with Korea JoonAng Daily, Bong-jin laid out a number of the benefits of using delivery robots including cheaper fees, increased security and the ability to take stuff away from a customer’s house. From that Q&A (emphasis ours):

I want to have robots deliver not only food but also food ingredients, products sold at convenience stores, medicine and even newspapers. On their way back from delivering, robots could pick up recyclable waste from customer’s houses and throw it away. If consumers no longer have to buy a large amount of products at once at a supermarket thanks to delivery robots, the capacity of refrigerators would also be reduced.

I had a bit of a “duh, of course!” moment when reading that. Rather than sending an empty robot back to home base or to the next restaurant, it should make itself useful throughout its entire trip. Taking out the trash, as it were, seems like a pretty good start.

There are obviously some issues with that: keeping the robot clean, having convenient locations to accept recycling, making sure people are not just dumping whatever they want to get rid of in the robots.

But all these problems can be addressed. It could reduce plastic waste by having re-usable food containers. This could be much like the glass milk bottles of old, an order for food delivery would have its own containers that would be returned with the next order.

Or, thinking more broadly, with grocery or package delivery, customers could return cardboard boxes or packaging back to their origin for re-use and recycling.

The point is that as we think about delivery robots hitting our streets, we should remember that their journey is not just one-way. Let’s put those returning robots to work!

Starship Raises $25 Million to Roll Out More Delivery Robots

Starship Technologies, makers of squat, autonomous wheeled delivery robots, announced yesterday that the company has raised $25 million in additional “seed” funding. The round includes follow-on investments from existing backers including Matrix Partners and Morpheus Ventures. This brings the total amount the company has raised to $42.2 million. The company also announced it has brought on Lex Bayer, a former Airbnb exec as Starship’s new CEO.

Starship’s rolling robots can be used to deliver items like packages, restaurant food or groceries within an hour. They are currently in pilot programs in Redwood City, CA and Washington DC, and according to press materials, Starship robots have covered 100,000 miles in 20 countries and 100 cities around the world.

Starship, which also counts Daimler Benz as an investor, said the new money will help scale its business. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would deploy 1,000 delivery robots to corporate and academic campuses across the U.S. and Europe by the end of the year.

The robot delivery space is certainly heating up. In addition to Starship, Marble has its own fleet of delivery robots, and counts DoorDash as a partner. DoorDash may also be working on its own robots as part of its own moonshot initiatives program. Kiwi robots are rolling around UC Berkeley’s campus delivering food. And over in China, Alibaba just unveiled its own driverless delivery robot, the G Plus.

But the biggest hurdle for Starship isn’t the competition, it’s state and local laws. While states like Virginia and Wisconsin have passed laws permitting robot deliveries, San Franciso has tightened restrictions on how they can be used. That’s one reason why Starship’s rollout on campuses is a smart decision. It can work out and improve its technology on private property, sidestepping those municipal hurdles.

If you’re intrigued by robots and want to learn more about how they are impacting the food industry, be sure to check out our podcast, The Automat, which hosts entertaining and informative conversations about tomorrow’s food-related robots and artificial intelligence today.

San Francisco Restricts Robot Delivery

Before robots can rise up and take over the world, they will need to overcome… municipal laws. Case in point, San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors voted to enact tight restrictions on the use of delivery robots in the city.

The ordinance allows companies to get a permit for the purposes of testing autonomous delivery devices–for research purposes only— and include a lengthy list of requirements including:

  • Robot can’t go faster than 3 miles per hour
  • A human operator needs to be within 30 feet
  • The robots have to give the right of way to people
  • Testing can only be done in certain areas of the city

The move from the SF board highlights the importance of humans in fulfilling the promise of automated robot delivery. While advances in robotics continues at a rapid clip, local governments tend to lag behind technology. Indeed, as Curbed writes, the SF board is saying this measure was a way to get ahead of an impending technology shift and not be caught off guard by one like they were with Uber and Google busses. Whether that plays out remains to be seen.

But while San Francisco dips its cautious toe in the robot delivery waters, other areas of the country are jumping in. SF neighbor, Redwood City has a robot delivery pilot program in effect with Starship Technologies, and other states such as Wisconsin, Virginia have passed laws allowing robot deliveries.

And if peer pressure to keep up with other governments isn’t enough, perhaps seeing cross-state rival, Los Angeles, roll out their Top Chef robot deliveries this week will light the robotic fire in San Francisco.

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The Spoon Video Top Three: Food Truck Tech, Robo-delivery and Instant Aging For Wine

It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recaping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.

This week’s we take a look at Bistro Planets’s food truck tech, DoorDash’s pilot program with Marble for delivery robots and whether or not instant aging is the newest trend in wine.

Enjoy!