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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

self-driving delivery

Nuro Gets Regulatory Approval for Self-Driving Delivery in California

Autonomous food delivery revved a few miles forward today. Nuro, a company that makes self-driving vehicles for delivery, announced it is receiving the first-ever Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit from the California DMV. According to an email sent to The Spoon, this gives Nuro permission to launch a commercial autonomous vehicle service in California (which would be the first in the state). 

In layman’s terms, that means Nuro can now delivery groceries, household items, and other goods to customers’ doorsteps via its own self-driving vehicles. 

These pod-like vessels are roughly half the size of a regular car and completely autonomous. There isn’t even room for a human drive to sit in the vehicle, which travels at a max of 25 miles per hour. 

The news follows Nuro’s $500 million fundraise from earlier this month, as well as the testing permit Nuro received in April to operate on public roads in California.

Regulatory approval, or lack thereof, is one of the major factors inhibiting widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles for food and grocery delivery. State and local governments have to ensure public safety on roads, sidewalks, bridges, and other throughways before they can allow fleets of unmanned vehicles to be unleashed in cities and towns. That explains why some companies, including Starship and Kiwi, started on college campuses.

But Starship and Kiwi rover bots that are considerably smaller than Nuro’s R2 vehicle, which wouldn’t in all likelihood easily drive through the camps quad. The Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit means Nuro won’t have to resort to such locations in order to make its delivery services available to U.S. residents. 

Nuro said in today’s email that it will start delivery service with existing partners in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in the new year. Service will begin with the company’s autonomous Prius vehicles and eventually transition to the company’s “full fleet” of both Priuses and R2s. 

Also this week, Nuro acquired autonomous trucking company Ike. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Autonomous Middle-Mile Company Gatik Raises $25M

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik announced today that it has raised a $25 million Series A round of funding. The round was co-led by Wittington Ventures and Innovation Endeavors with participation from FM Capital and Intact Ventures, as well as existing investors Dynamo Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, AngelPad and others. This brings the total amount raised by Gatik to $29.5 million.

Unlike other players in the self-driving delivery space, the Palo Alto, California-based Gatik is focused on the middle-mile — that is, the intra-location routes for a business, for example warehouse to store, store to store, etc.

The advantage of this, from a self-driving vehicle perspective, is that these middle-mile routes are fixed and repeated. This reduces the amount of “thinking” that a self-driving vehicle has to do as it carries goods around because it’s not encountering as many new scenarios. These fixed routes can also help put regulators creating laws around self-driving vehicles more at ease because of their limited scope and reach.

From a business’ perspective, like a grocer, a fleet of autonomous middle-mile vehicles could run all day, every day, ensuring that locations are always fully stocked. In its press announcement, Gatik said that its autonomous vehicles are operating up to seven days a week, 12 hours a day, on single routes up to 300 miles.

Along with its funding announcement, Gatik today also announced that Canada’s Loblaw grocery chain will deploy a fleet of five Gatik vehicles for middle mile delivery in Toronto starting in January 2021. Gatik’s cargo trucks feature temperature control, so they can be used for the transport of cold and frozen foods as well.

In the Loblaw press announcement, Gatik said that its autonomous vehicles will run between automated picking facilities and retail stores, and allows for inventory pooling across multiple location, as well as contactless delivery.

November has been a busy month for autonomous delivery. Last week Walmart announced a partnership with Cruise for self-driving grocery delivery. Nuro announced it had raised another $500 million for its self-driving pod vehicle solution. Part of the reason for all of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated interest in contactless delivery options to reduce human-to-human interaction.

Gatik has previously worked with Walmart, and says it has conducted 30,000 autonomous orders for multiple Fortune 500 customers across North America.  

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said Gatik raised $22.5 million. We regret the error.

PIX Moving Makes a Customizable Autonomous Chassis for Delivery

There are a variety of different autonomous vehicles of all shapes and sizes coming to market: From the cargo vans of Udelv, to the pod-like R2 from Nuro, all the way down to the cooler sized sidewalk robots from Starship.

Chinese company Pix Moving is taking a bit of a different approach to autonomous vehicles by removing most of the vehicle. The company is building a self-driving chassis platform on top of which its customers can build whatever they like.

So a big restaurant chain could create a mobile pod of lockers for meal delivery, or a grocery store could create a temperature-controlled store on wheels. A large warehouse-type store could just attach a flat base for moving inventory around.

PIX’s chassis is electric and low-speed, which allows it to sidestep some of the more complex regulations associated with full-sized, full-speed autonomous vehicles. All four wheels of the PIX chassis are steerable, making it highly maneuverable. It’s also 3D printed, so its lightweight and there are fewer parts. And, like any autonomous vehicle, it is packed with an array of sensors and cameras to navigate and avoid obstacles.

I spoke with Chase Cao, PIX COO, by phone this week and he explained that his company is currently navigating the rules and regulations both in China and the U.S. to get its self-driving platform running on public roads. In the meantime, its chassis is being used on some private corporate campuses in both countries. Right now, PIX sells its chassis outright, though Cao said they may look at more of a leasing model in the future.

PIX is worth watching, especially as it relates to food delivery, because of the flexibility of its platform. By pushing the design of the compartments that carry the cargo to its customers (restaurants, grocers, etc.), those compartments can be tailored to a specific set of needs (size, temperature, etc.). This can then create more efficient delivery, and thereby generating even more demand for autonomous delivery.

In other words, there will be even more variety of self-driving vehicles coming to our roads.

Walmart to Test Autonomous Grocery Delivery With Cruise’s Electric Cars

Walmart announced today that it is hooking up with self-driving electric car company Cruise to experiment with autonomous grocery delivery. The two will pilot a program in Scottsdale, Arizona starting early next year.

The corporate blog post announcing the partnership was light on details, so we don’t know how many stores in the Scottsdale area will be participating, where the service areas will be or how big the fleet of self-driving vehicles will be.

This isn’t Walmart’s first ride with self-driving delivery vehicles. In the summer of 2018, Walmart partnered with Waymo in a small pilot to autonomously chauffeur people from their homes to Walmarts to pick up their orders. The goal of that pilot was to learn more about curbside pick up. In 2019, Walmart worked with autonomous van company Gitik for deliveries along the “middle mile” between its stores. And at the end of 2019, Walmart announced it was using Nuro’s self-driving pod vehicles for grocery delivery in Houston, Texas.

This time around, Walmart’s pitch is less about self-driving and more about the environment, as Cruise’s vehicles are all 100 percent electric. Should this pilot prove successful, it will align with Walmart’s stated goal of achieving zero emissions across all its operations by 2040, including the electrification of all of its vehicles.

Walmart and other retailers will need to offer all the delivery options they can in the coming years. Online grocery is projected to hit 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025, which means grocers will need to boost their capacity for increased delivery. Walmart is already among those leading that charge with two-hour delivery as well as it’s Walmart+ delivery service, which gives members free unlimited delivery. The company has even enlisted Instacart for help with same day grocery delivery.

Full-sized self-driving vehicles still have a lot of regulatory hurdles to overcome, but kudos to Walmart for helping push the technology forward (while getting food to our doors).

Gatik Launches Self-Driving Box Truck for Middle Mile Deliveries

Gatik, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on middle mile delivery, announced a new self-driving box truck today. The new trucks feature temperature control, allowing them to transport cold and frozen food and goods.

Don’t expect to see these self-driving box trucks in your neighborhood. Gatik’s service is meant for the middle mile, meaning it shuttles deliveries between business locations, not to a consumer’s front door. For example, last year Walmart announced it was using Gatik to move food between its own store locations.

The middle mile is actually ripe for autonomous driving. Self-driving vehicles are good with set routes that are heavily traveled. Keeping within a limited scope of travel means the vehicles’ self-driving systems don’t have to contend with the complexities of traveling through busy neighborhoods, and the limited geography can be more appealing to local regulators wary of unleashing fully autonomous vehicles on public roads.

Gatik’s new self-driving trucks are also arriving during a global pandemic when the world is trying to reduce human-to-human contact. Autonomous vehicles can remove at least one human from the supply chain equation, which, when multiplied across multiple industries, companies, and supply routes can add up pretty quickly.

Autonomous vehicles can also operate without breaks, helping keep stores better stocked, which we’ve seen can be an issue when people are panic shopping. Gatik said it’s been shuttling Walmart deliveries 12 hours each day, 7 days each week since July of last year. 

The COVID-19 outbreak could accelerate the acceptance of autonomous vehicles on the road. Nuro got the greenlight from the state of California to further test its self-driving pod-like vehicles on public roads. Refraction is using its autonomous REV-1 for restaurant and grocery delivery in Ann Arbor, MI. And Starship robots are making food deliveries in Tempe, AZ and in Fairfax, VA.

Gatik says that it has delivered more than 15,000 orders for multiple retail customers across North America and that its new box truck is the first autonomous delivery vehicle with temperature control capabilities. Gatik just might make the middle mile very cool for self-driving vehicles.

California DMV to Allow Light-Duty Self-Driving Vehicles for Tasks like Grocery Delivery

Self-driving grocery and food delivery just got one step closer to becoming a reality in California. The Golden State announced yesterday that light-duty autonomous delivery vehicles can now be tested and put to commercial use on the state’s public roads after going through the proper permitting process with the Department of Motor Vehicles (h/t The Verge).

From the press announcement:

Under revised regulations approved Monday by the Office of Administrative Law, companies with a DMV permit can operate autonomous delivery vehicles weighing less than 10,001 pounds. The DMV can begin approving new applications in 30 days. Qualifying vehicles include autonomous passenger cars, midsized pickup trucks and cargo vans carrying goods such as pizza or groceries.

You can read the full list of requirements here.

This is good news for startups like Nuro and Robomart, both of which use pod-like low-speed vehicles for delivery, are half the size of regular cars, and do not have space for a driver. Though both companies are based in California, the bulk of their public testing has occurred out of that state. Nuro in particular has done grocery delivery in Arizona and Texas in partnership with Kroger, while Robomart announced a test with ShopRite in Boston.

But the new rules are also a boon to AutoX, which operates full-sized autonomous vehicles for food delivery as well as mobile commerce. Presumably, this would also help a company like Refraction, which has three-wheeled autonomous vehicles that are smaller than Nuro’s pods but still operate on roads, if they choose to enter the California market.

Some autonomous grocery and food delivery has already been happening in California. The aforementioned AutoX has been operating in San Jose, and online grocer Farmstead has been working with self-driving van startup Udelv for grocery delivery. In those examples, though, a human driver is on-board for safety reasons.

As we’ve covered before, advancements in delivery technology, whether it be self-driving vehicles or high-flying drones, present a challenge for local and city governments. They must balance the desire to adopt new tech while maintaining the safety of its citizens as well as recouping revenues lost from traditional systems being replaced (think: parking fees lost from autonomous ride-sharing). It’s happening quickly and in the coming year we can expect a flurry of new laws across the country as states try to adapt.

Squishy Tires and Delivery Sweet Spots: More on Refraction AI’s Three-Wheeled Delivery Bot

When Refraction AI came out of stealth a couple weeks back, the company provided a fair amount of detail about its REV-1 autonomous delivery robot. The REV-1 has three wheels, can ride in a bike lane and ditched LIDAR in favor of on-board cameras for its navigation.

But we still had a few questions about Refraction AI’s robot and its approach to autonomous delivery, so I got on the phone with Refraction co-founder and CEO Matthew Johnson-Roberson this week to find out more.

One of the REV-1 launch’s biggest messages was that the robot was built to handle more inclement weather, but early coverage didn’t spell out exactly how. Right now a lot of autonomous vehicle testing happens in sunny places like Phoenix, Houston and the Bay Area. Clear skies and lots of light make it easier for robots to “see” things like lines on the road as they navigate.

Johnson-Roberson said that 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.”

While the REV-1 is autonomous, there are still human tele-operators who can take over should the vehicle get stuck at, say, a complex intersection with a mix of cars and pedestrians.

The REV-1 is about the same size and speed as a bike, making its form factor kind of like a Goldilocks. It’s not big, like a full-sized car, and not small, like a rover robot. But that means it is free from the limitations of those other form factors. Full-sized self-driving cars may go faster and farther, but they also require a safety driver on-board, which pushes up the price of operation. Rover bots are cheaper, but they are slower and can’t hold as much food.

So what is the best environment for this in-between vehicle?

“Suburban LA is not a good idea,” said Johnson-Roberson, “We can go half a mile to 2.5 miles. That’s the sweet spot for what we’re trying to do.” So more dense urban areas are better for the REV-1. Refraction AI is eyeing Boston, Madison, WI and Austin, TX as potential rollout cities.

Right now, the company is working with two restaurants in the Ann Arbor, Mich. area. Johnson-Roberson didn’t provide many details about business models, but said that as the company expands, it will work directly with restaurants, providing them REV-1s and charging a per-delivery fee that “Is better than [what] Uber Eats is charging.”

Once a restaurant gets an order, it will use a tablet provided by Refraction to tell the REV-1 where to go. A code is texted to the customer who uses it to unlock the REV-1 when it arrives with the food.

While it’s working directly with restaurants right now, Johnson-Roberson said that his company is open to working with third-party delivery services.

Refraction AI is definitely a company to watch in the emerging delivery space. Self-driving delivery isn’t a zero sum game, but the REV-1’s unique form factor should make it appealing because of its combination of size and speed.

SoftBank Expands its Driverless Delivery Empire with $940M Nuro Investment

SoftBank has invested $940 million into driverless vehicle startup Nuro The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal is noteworthy not just for the amount of money involved, but also for the growth it could spur in driverless delivery, as well as how it plays into SoftBank’s portfolio of automated mobility companies.

Nuro makes autonomous, low-speed electric pod-like vehicles that are about half the size of a traditional car. These pods are built from the ground up to carry goods, and there is literally no room for a driver. Since the pods are light, nimble and top out at 25 mph, they could be a safer alternative to full-sized autonomous vehicles and therefore a more attractive option for risk-averse city planners and regulators creating laws around the emerging driverless delivery space.

One has to wonder how the folks at Robomart, which makes similar pod-like vehicles, are feeling today. On the one hand, Robomart is going after a different market, forsaking direct point-to-point delivery in favor of mobile commerce, so they aren’t direct competitors, and SoftBank’s massive money drop is a validation of low-speed vehicles as a technology. But Nuro’s pods are already being tested by grocery giant Kroger to deliver groceries in Arizona, and this cash infusion will help Nuro quickly scale up is engineering, production and business development. Nuro now has the money to invest in and improve its technology and get its platform used by more partners, potentially boxing out Robomart.

But almost more interesting than Nuro’s newfound cash to expand is Softbank as the investor. Over the past year, SoftBank has made a number of bets on mobility and food delivery:

  • SoftBank and Toyota teamed up for a joint venture called MONET, which will create an autonomous vehicle platform for a number of different smart mobility services including food delivery and even mobile food preparation.
  • SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume, which uses vast amounts of data to predict the amount of pizza delivery on any given night, as well as robots to prepare those pizzas, and mobile ovens to heat them just-in-time for delivery.
  • SoftBank is an investor in both DoorDash and Uber Eats, two food delivery services experimenting with self-driving vehicles, robot delivery and perhaps even drone delivery.

With the Nuro investment, SoftBank adds another delivery form factor (low speed pods) to its logistical lineup. With all of these investments that connect goods and consumers, Softbank is setting itself up to be a dominant player in our increasingly self-driving and delivery-filled future.

AI-Powered Grocer Farmstead Running Self-Driving Delivery Pilot

Farmstead, the grocery startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to precisely manage its inventory, announced yesterday that it has been piloting grocery delivery via self-driving vehicles in the Bay Area.

This autonomous delivery is made possible through a partnership with fellow Bay Area startup Udelv, which makes the autonomous delivery vehicles and has been running other grocery delivery pilots in Oklahoma. The two companies began this latest pilot last month in the Bay Area.

Farmstead customers receiving their orders via self-driving vehicle are notified when their delivery has arrived and given a code via SMS. Customers use that code to open a designated compartment on the delivery van and retrieve their groceries. For now, there will be a human operator still in the delivery van for safety reasons, per California regulations.

Farmstead’s hook in the grocery world is that it has developed an AI platform that uses factors such as product popularity and expiration dates, to accurately stock its shelves without over or under-purchasing items.

Using an autonomous vehicle can extend that accuracy into routing and delivery. “We have a car that’s controlled by code,” said Farmstead CEO and co-founder Pradeep Elankumaran said during a phone interview. “That’s extremely compelling to us.” Autonomous vehicles will get more metrics along its delivery path, picking up data on things like time per stop, etc.. Using that data can help Farmstead continually refine its logistical routes.

For example, Elankumaran said, if a customer isn’t home for a delivery, rather than having a human debating whether or not to wait for the person to arrive or figure out what to do next, an autonomous vehicle can be programmed to wait X minutes and then re-engineer their route automatically to return to the house in an efficient manner.

Autonomous vehicles are becoming quite the rage in the grocery industry. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, AutoX is piloting its self-driving grocery delivery program, and in Arizona, Kroger is testing out autonomous delivery in a partnership with Nuro.

For its part, Farmstead also “farms” out its AI platform to other grocers. Elankumaran wouldn’t provide any details on how that program is proceeding, but now we’ll see if and how autonomous delivery plays into the offering as well.