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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Kiwi

Editor Roundtable Podcast: Gather ‘Round the Botfire

Each week, our editors get together for an planning call where we discuss topics, trends and stories we want to cover on The Spoon. Since we always have a blast talking foodtech, we thought we’d double-dip this week and also record the conversation.

So here it is, the first Spoon editor roundtable podcast!

The topics we discuss include:

We had a lot of fun recording this, and may turn it into a regular thing. Let us know what you think on Twitter and in the comments below!

As always, you can listen to the pod by hitting play below, downloading it direct or subscribing on Apple podcasts.

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.

Kiwi Delivery Robots Expand into Los Angeles

If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens.

According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month. Westwood is home to UCLA, so this particular expansion makes sense given that Kiwi already operates at and around UC Berkeley.

A spokesperson for Kiwi told the Daily Bruin that the company picked UCLA because of the compact nature of the campus. It probably doesn’t hurt that LA typically has great weather throughout the year, thereby reducing at least one bit of complexity for the autonomous, cooler-sized robots to navigate around.

Kiwi is working with 15 Westwood businesses including Subway, Jamba Juice and Veggie Grill. For now, however, robot deliveries are only being made off campus as Kiwi doesn’t have the necessary permits for them to scurry around campus. Until those are sorted out Kiwi will offer a human delivery person for on-campus deliveries.

Campuses in general are becoming a popular option for robot delivery companies. Earlier this year Kiwi rival Starship announced that it would be deploying 1,000 delivery robots by the end of this year and that campuses (both academic and corporate) would be a major avenue of growth for them.

Starting with campuses is a smart idea for robot delivery. They are like starter cities. First, you have a sizeable audience of students and workers who spend most of their time there. Working on campuses (at least private ones) can also help sidestep some of the municipal legal issues that come with running robots on city streets. Campuses are also typically well maintained, so roads and walkways won’t have as many hazards to navigate.

You might think students would be excited to have futuristic, self-driving robots running around their campus. But the reactions reported by the Daily Bruin were much more negative. Rather than a marvel of technology, students quoted saw them as easy targets for theft, causes of increased congestion and basically just something that won’t catch on.

Of course, if I had movie stars in my backyard, I may feel the same way (but maybe with this expansion Uber will give Kiwi a closer look).

“How’s My Programming?” Kiwi Founder Lists Personal Number on Delivery Bots

Robots, as we have noted, can work longer hours and haul more stuff than people can. But robots can also bring animosity to a community who may not appreciate potential jobs being lost, or having cooler-sized vehicles scurrying around sidewalks.

That is why Kiwi co-founder and CEO, Felipe Chavez, works just as hard on building empathy as he does building robots.

Kiwi currently has 50 robots making food deliveries, mostly around the University of California, Berkeley, which Chavez describes as “a war zone” for robots. There is a large homeless population, heavy anti-technology sentiment, and, of course, drunk college students. All of which could spell trouble for the cute li’l robots.

One of the reasons other robot delivery companies have run into trouble, especially in San Francisco, which enacted strict regulation around delivery robots, is because those companies didn’t respect the sidewalk. Early robots were large and took up a lot of space, making it tricky for pedestrians.

Kiwi, on the other hand, focuses on making smaller, more easily appealing robots. They sport cute LCD screen “face” in an attempt to build empathy with people, and there’s even a “How’s my programming?” sticker complete with Chavez’s personal phone number on the robots.

I sat down with Chavez at the recent FOOD IT conference in San Francisco, where we talked more about human-robot relations, the specs on Kiwi’s three robots, and the company’s business model.

The Spoon @ FOOD IT: Felipe Chavez of Kiwi Campus from The Spoon on Vimeo.

For more in-depth conversations about food tech, check out all of our video chats from the FOOD IT show and our Smart Kitchen Summits.

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.