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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Refraction

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.

Wait, Robot Delivery Companies Charge the Same Commissions as Human Delivery?

One of the key selling points of our delivery robot future was that it would be less expensive than existing human efforts. Yes, automation would take some human jobs, but the savings would create cheaper food and faster service. But a story out in WIRED today shows that at least right now, robot delivery companies are charging the same commissions as their human counterparts.

The main thrust of the WIRED story is that robot deliveries should be having a big moment during this pandemic. Robots reduce human-to-human contact, can go into dangerous areas, and can operate around the clock. But they aren’t having that big moment, hampered by technical limitations, local regulations, and in some cases — cost.

WIRED highlights two delivery companies: Starship and Refraction. Starship makes cooler-sized robots that are best known in the U.S. for scurrying around a number of college campuses bringing meals and snacks to hungry students. Refraction makes the bigger REV-1, a robust three-wheeled robot that can tackle inclement weather and launched lunch delivery in Ann Arbor, MI at the end of last year.

In Fairfax, VA, where Starship recently started making restaurant deliveries, the owners of the Havabite restaurant told WIRED that Starship is charging them 20 percent commission fees (after a one-month free trial), which they said is more than the restaurant pays GrubHub for delivery.

Up in Michigan, Refraction is charging 15 percent commission on deliveries, which WIRED says is “a rate equal to or lower than that charged by human-powered delivery apps.”

We have reached out to both Starship and Refraction for confirmation clarification. A Refraction rep emailed us the following: “Average delivery fees for a restaurant are typically 30% (like through Doordash or Uber Eats) and [Refraction is] charging half of that. On the consumer side, there is a $3 fee which is about a quarter of the typical order cost. Refraction is also now testing a grocery delivery pilot with zero fees.”

Back in January of 2019, as it was rolling out to its first college campus, Starship told us that it “uses different revenue models depending on location,” and that it “sometimes charge[s] a margin on top of the delivery fee.” For its part, Refraction told us in July of 2019 that it was charging a delivery fee that was better than what Uber is charging.

I get that 2019 was a lifetime ago and a lot has happened since then. I also get that robots ain’t cheap, especially when they are just starting out and haven’t reached scale yet. But human third-party delivery services are being vilified for cutting into the already slim margins of restaurants during this pandemic crisis, so much so that local governments are enforcing caps on delivery commissions. You’d think robot companies, which still have technical and regulatory hurdles to overcome, would want to make them as attractive an alternative as possible.

But maybe that isn’t possible right now. This COVID-19 pandemic is impacting every corner of the economy, including the companies behind these burgeoning robot delivery services. It’s not exactly the easiest time to raise fresh capital to fuel growth. Starship reportedly went through a round of layoffs at the end of March.

Despite all this, the coronavirus has strengthened my belief that robots are the future of delivery, especially in a more socially distant post-pandemic world. Hopefully the economics will work out so robots can help us get through all this to find out.

From Michigan to Korea, Robots Keep Food Rolling When People Can’t

Prior to this pandemic, the big ethical questions surrounding food robotics and automation was their impact on loss of human jobs. But as COVID-19 has forced us to social distance and rethink our regular activities, replacing humans with robots for food delivery seems like a more ethical choice. Robots, after all, don’t need face masks, can be placed in frontline situations and won’t accidentally cough on your groceries.

As it’s done with many other aspects of the meal journey, the coronavirus is accelerating the adoption of certain types of food tech — like robots — that otherwise would have come to market on a much longer timeline.

The Detroit News posted a story yesterday about the increased demand for Refraction’s delivery robots in Michigan. Refraction makes the rugged, three-wheeled, self-driving REV-1 delivery bot. It’s bigger than Starship’s cooler-sized robots, yet not as big as Nuro’s self-driving pod vehicles.

At the end of last year, Refraction kicked off a beta program to deliver takeout meals from four different Ann Arbor restaurants. The Detroit News reports that Refraction now has more than 400 restaurant partners and the company’s fleet of five robots is running at capacity. Refraction is also working to get into grocery delivery.

The robots are cleaned between deliveries, and Refraction has added UV lights to the interior of the robot to further sanitize the cargo compartment. The robot is also contactless as consumers use their phone to unlock and open the robot to retrieve their food.

Refraction’s robots also, obviously, reduce human-to-human contact for people receiving food while sheltering in place. Our country may regain a certain amount of freedom to move in the coming months, but we’ve had a pretty healthy fear of other people pumped into us for the past couple of months. Robots may be more welcome once we’re past this.

These robotic advantages could also be applied beyond restaurant delivery and into restaurants themselves. The Korea Times reports that this week Woowa Bros. announced it would offer free rentals of its “Dilly” server robot to 50 restaurants in Korea for two months starting in mid-April.

The Dilly is an autonomous robot with a series of racks meant to work the front of house, delivering food from the kitchen to tables and bringing empty plates back.

Woowa Bros. launched the Dilly server program back in November and charged roughly $773 a month (with a two-year contract) for the robot. The Korea Times writes that 164 restaurants applied for the program, and currently Woowa has 23 robots operating in 16 restaurants across Korea.

It’s entirely likely that we’ll see more server robots in restaurants here in the U.S. as well. Though coronavirus has permanently shuttered at least 3 percent of restaurants across the nation, there’s already talk of what restaurants will look like when dine-in rooms re-open. Expect fewer people, disposable menus, and possibly servers wearing masks.

One has to wonder what people will prefer interacting with: a server wearing a mask or a robot? To be fair, a lot more of us will probably be wearing masks in public in the near future, but the cold, sterility of a robot may be more appealing to nervous people just starting to come out from sheltering in place.

Refraction and Woowa aren’t the only examples of robots gaining more popularity. Starship recently expanded the use of its food delivery robots beyond college campuses and onto city streets in Arizona and around Washington DC. And Nuro just got the greenlight to test its autonomous delivery vehicles on public streets in California.

But it’s not just the consumer end of the robotic equation that we should be thinking about. While robots may help reduce human-to-human contact when accepting your food, they also relieve some of the new dangers of being a delivery person. Let’s face it, delivery people have worked hard during this outbreak and have often gotten the short end of the gig economy stick. Ideally the food industry can use any savings from automation to help fund new job opportunities for humans.

The ethical questions surrounding the availability of human jobs in an increasingly automated world will remain and need to be addressed in a thoughtful manner after this virus recedes. But in the shorter term, robots may help reduce transmission of a deadly virus and perhaps ease a little bit of anxiety around getting our food delivered.

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.