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Starship

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.

Starship’s Robots are Headed for School and Corporate Campuses

Starship Technologies today announced a major commercial rollout (pardon the pun) of its small, autonomous robot delivery vehicles to academic and corporate campuses across the U.S. and Europe. In a press statement, the company said it will deploy more than 1,000 robots by the end of the year.

Starship’s robots have already been in use on Intuit’s 4.3 acre campus to deliver food and office supplies to workers. As shown in the video below, people can use the Starship app to order food and choose a pickup point (only outside deliveries for now, not inside their building or to their desk). The app will tell them when their package will arrive and once there, customers use their phone to unlock the robot and take their food.

Starship Campus Delivery Service with Robots

Focusing on corporate and academic campuses is a smart play by Starship. First and foremost, this move presumably sidesteps any legal and municipal issues associated with autonomous robot deliveries on public streets. While pilot programs for robot delivery are happening in various cities across the country, San Francisco--a hotbed for early adopter activity – has put tight restrictions on them. By transitioning from public sidewalks to private campuses Starship’s robots can be more free-range, as it were.

In fact, today’s announcement comes 13 days after Starship was supposed to hold a press conference in which the mayor of San Jose was reportedly going to help “welcome Starship delivery robots to the city.” As far as I can tell, that press conference never happened. I reached out to Starship after the press conference evaporated to find out why, but never heard back.

It’s also a smart move to stick with campuses for the good of the robots. At least on corporate campuses, there will be less chance of vandalism, theft or accident befalling the cute li’l delivery vehicles. And even though campuses aren’t urban environments, there is enough infrastructure in place for the robot to learn how to better navigate people, roads, and traffic to get smarter.

Starship’s press release today said that it will continue to grow its residential neighborhood deliveries as well. In that arena, however, it will be competing with rival, Marble, which just last week closed its $10 million Series A. Starship, for its part, has raised $17.2 million from automotive company Daimler Benz.

If you’re at Intuit, or on a campus that gets one of these robots, be sure to take a pic and send it to us here at The Spoon.

Delivery Platform DoorDash Hires Marble’s Robot Drivers For Food Delivery

If you live in San Francisco and order from DoorDash, you might find a friendly Marble robot on your front door step the next time you get takeout. Today DoorDash announced it would be using autonomous ground-delivery robots made by Marble, a robotics startup, for a food delivery pilot program in select San Francisco neighborhoods.

Marble was founded in 2015 by robotics enthusiasts Matt Delaney, Jason Calaiaro, Kevin Peterson while they attended Carnegie Mellon and describes themselves as a “scrappy robotics startup” working to build autonomous urban delivery robots. Scrappy as they might be, DoorDash is the second delivery pilot they’ve announced this year, partnering in April with Yelp’s Eat24.

The companies report that the pilot will allow them to “explore how to best optimize last-mile deliveries” and the first restaurant to take part in the robot delivery program fast food chain Jack in the Box. They made a quick video to show off Marble robots toting its first DoorDash deliveries in the North Beach neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Jack in the Box | Robot Delivery

The revenue model for robotics companies to partner with retail or food delivery services hasn’t been fully divulged; a spokesperson did say that Marble is being compensated for the work done in the pilot but declined to elaborate. However, delivery fees for a robot driver versus a human are the same for DoorDash customers. Marble said it didn’t have any hard data about how robot drivers create cost savings for delivery companies but that it hoped to share that information down the road.

Food delivery is an increasingly crowded space; aside from traditional restaurant delivery, “new delivery models” – companies like DoorDash, GrubHub and Eat24 – is expected to be a $20 billion market by 2025 according to a McKinsey report. In order to create efficiencies and differentiate, companies are looking to innovations like robot delivery drivers to stay ahead. And Marble isn’t the only game in sidewalk robotic delivery – former founders of Skype launched autonomous robotics startup Starship and received a $17 milllion investment earlier this year from carmarker Daimler Benz.

Starship had also announced a pilot in Redwood City, CA with DoorDash earlier this year. When asked if this program was designed to replace the competitive pilot, DoorDash responded that it was “…continuing the existing pilot with Starship in Redwood City, Washington DC, San Carlos and Sunnyvale. The Marble partnership adds to that relationship, allowing DoorDash to bring robot deliveries to San Francisco while also testing a new type of form factor and technology.”

Meanwhile, if you happen to see a Marble delivery robot on the sidewalk, you’ll probably see a human chaperone with it to answer questions and assist with interactions. At times when there isn’t a person nearby, Marble says they have remote operators ready to assist with issues and so far, they haven’t encountered any problems in the neighborhoods they’re serving.

Doritos By Drone? It Could Take A While

Across the skies in the U.S., delivery drones are a concept that holds great promise. This vision remains as an elusive scheme held hostage by regulators and uncertain implementations. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and even 7-Eleven are in the pilot and trial phases of drone delivery, as they test range, durability and payload of these flying, robotic carriers. A sign of domestic market uncertainty is that many of these early experiments are taking place on foreign soil.

Israeli-based startup FlyTrex is taking a different approach to the drone delivery opportunity. The company certainly has its eye on the food delivery down the road. While that space sorts out, FlyTrex is offering an out-of-the-box solution, complete with an API program, with potential appeal to markets beyond the culinary world with a focus on non-U.S. customers. Sensing the commercial use of drones for food and/or groceries is, at best, murky, the company has a deal in place with the Ukrainian postal authorities to soon test the delivery of small parcels via these unmanned, low-flying aircraft. FlyTrex hopes this is a first of many such trials.

While local governments in the US are moving quickly to pave the way for slow-moving (and safe) sidewalk delivery robots, delivery drones on the other hand are stuck in a frustrating loop of regulations that prevent the space from moving forward which, in turn, limits the technological progress of this mode of robotic delivery. As with many current legislative battles, regulating drones has become a fight between state and federal government.

“This could be a brave new world — and a cool way to get your stuff,” Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis told Governmental Technology. Lewis is a Republican recently introduced bipartisan legislation to give the state, local and tribal governments’ jurisdiction over drones flying at 200 feet or lower. Lewis believes such a measure protects privacy and property rights while giving a boost to new technology.

The FAA is not keen on turning over drone regulation to local authorities. “If one or two municipalities enacted ordinances regulating [drones] in the navigable airspace and a significant number of municipalities followed suit, fractionalized control of the navigable airspace could result,” the agency wrote in 2015.

Despite obvious roadblocks, Amazon is undaunted in its pursuit of drone delivery. Given the amount of money the company has invested in the opportunity, as well as its pending purchase of Whole Foods, the supergiant retailer must explore every channel for efficiently getting goods from business to business and from business to consumer. Recently, Amazon has set up a research center in Paris to develop an air-traffic control system for drones as well as seeking a patent for cylindrical delivery hubs that work for drones and delivery trucks.

While there are plenty of sample videos detailing tests in various regions of the U.S., or tantalizing futurists with drones delivering beer, it may be years before we reach the viable intersection of food delivery and octocopters. In the meantime, the current zeitgeist for drone delivery is one that requires patience, a strong vision, and the resources to wait out multi pronged inertia.

Minor Roadblocks Stand in the Way of Personal Delivery Devices

Think about how crazy your dog gets chasing a Roomba around the living room. Multiple that chaos by several hundred and you have folks on sidewalks jumping out of the way as robots that resemble oversized canister vacuum cleaners scurry along their appointed rounds making food deliveries.

At least that’s the thinking of San Francisco City Supervisor Norman Yee. As he remarked to Government Technology, “I want to keep our sidewalks safe for people,” Yee said. “Seniors, children, people with disabilities can’t maneuver quickly” (to avoid robots).

The San Francisco area is ground zero for testing of robotics delivery agents. Marble, a venture-backed startup based in San Francisco has its robots delivering meals in the Mission District and Portero Hill for those using the Yelp Eat24 app. Starship Technologies is working with DoorDash in Redwood City while Postmates ran a test in San Francisco for one day last year. On the brink of joining the autonomous delivery mix is Dispatch, a South San Francisco startup.

The future of Personal Delivery Devices—as they are called in legal circles—is wrapped up in a battle of often conflicting interests. Restaurants look at their cost-saving potential with the ability to win loyal customers with quick, efficient delivery. For some chefs, PDDs can allow such visionaries as Anthony Strong to start virtual restaurants where home delivery replaces the need to have a physical dining establishment. In addition, using a fleet of robots can allow grocery stores and restaurants to offer delivery to suburban areas considered too costly to serve.

Early in its life cycle, autonomous delivery has met few legal challenges. San Carlos and Redwood City in California and Washington, D.C. have approved robotic delivery. Virginia and Idaho permit them at the state level, and in Wisconsin, a bill awaiting signature will permit robots to use sidewalks and crosswalks. Legislation, however, is not that straightforward with some companies using the law to keep competition at bay. For example, as a story in Recode points out, the Virginia law—drafted with the help of Starship Technologies– only permits robots under 50 pounds to be legally sanctioned; Marble’s autonomous delivery exceed that weight restriction.

While its impact can be debated, there is no debate that robots will replace workers in many sectors, including home delivery services. Given the entry level of such work, it’s likely not to be a hot button issue among labor leaders whose focus will be more on robots replacing skilled workers in manufacturing. As for robots replacing chefs—that should be a more interesting matter.

Also overlooked by many is the impact PDDs have on crowded sidewalks. As Treehugger.com puts it: “It all seems so quick and simple: design a cute little delivery AV and just let them loose onto the sidewalks. Because nobody ever asks what the pedestrians think, they don’t matter.”

“People don’t think about the negative impacts of these creative new ideas until it’s too late,” San Francisco’s Yee said. He believes for example that the Uber and Lyft cars that flood city streets cause traffic jams. “I’m trying to prevent some of the things that we did not prevent with other innovations” like ride hailing, he said.

The Sidewalk’s Getting Crowded As Marble & Yelp Launch Starship Robot Delivery Competitor

While Amazon’s trying to figure out how to deliver Prime packages using drones, other startups are making land grabs for the sidewalk delivery market. We wrote last year about Starship, the robot delivery vehicle made from the brains of Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. Starship was the first to start actively piloting robot delivery drivers around the streets of London; the robots were equipped with sophisticated onboard software that allowed them to autonomously navigate city streets to deliver goods door-to-door.

Now Starship has some competition in the form of a new partnership from Yelp’s food delivery service Eat24 and Marble, a startup that’s creating a “fleet of intelligent courier robots” made for urban delivery usage. Yelp Eat24 and Marble are together bringing robot food delivery to the streets of San Francisco. TechCrunch spotted the Marble vehicles earlier in the month and the duo made their official announcement late last week.

The Yelp Eat24 use of the Marble robots works the same as their normal delivery service; the company works with about 40,000 restaurants but offers delivery as an opt-in feature the restaurant can use for an additional fee. Marble effectively becomes another delivery vendor for Yelp, collecting a fee for each trip and yes – robots do accept tips.

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CNET takes a look at both Starship and Marble sidewalk delivery robots.

Marble’s robots are built to be modular – these particular models are designed for quick food delivery, with a pod that can hold a bag that keeps food cold or warm. But the cargo area could also be designed to carry other goods like medicine and could even be outfitted to have an onboard oven to actively cook food as it travels.

Marble is a direct competitor to Starship and offering delivery in San Francisco is upping the game; Starship announced earlier this year that it would start delivering in Washington, D.C. via delivery partner Postmates and in Redwood City, CA using DoorDash.

Both Marble and Starship have committed to sending human “chaperones” with the sidewalk robots for their early journeys. Marble said it was in order to answer questions about the robot to interested pedestrians, but it’s probably also to gather qualitative data about how people react to the robots and what real life risks they might encounter.

It’s not a surprise that the market for food delivery in the U.S. is so hot – 2015 was the first year that Americans spent more on takeout food than they did on traditional groceries. Not only that, but millennials – the generation quickly taking over the baby boomers in size and buying power – indicate that they are more eager than most to order prepared takeout food. If companies can figure out how to reliably deliver that food without lots of overhead and outsource a lower skilled job to friendly robots, the way we get our food a decade from now will be drastically different.

Robot food delivery is probably just the beginning; as Marble’s modular build suggests, the opportunity for having other goods delivered is real and could easily be accomplished by a partnership with a healthcare system (medicine) or a retail giant like Target or Walmart. Amazon competition, anyone?

DoorDash Adds a B2B View to the On-Demand Home Delivery Market

DoorDash’s latest TV spot shows a family relaxing in their San Francisco Victorian home when they are suddenly alerted that dinner has arrived. As a micro sized red car pulls up, dad jumps out of his chair, daughter pushes over her toy tea set and Rover makes a beeline for the door. Mom answers the doorbell where she is greeted by a smiling “Dasher” who hands her the food. Dad and daughter are hanging out the window grinning as if they had won the Publishers Clearing House prize. Yes, it’s DoorDash, and the spot ends with the slogan, “Get ready to get the door.”

The finely crafted 30-second ad may inspire customers to download the DoorDash app and order up their Sunday supper. However, the company’s recent announcements indicate restaurant-to-home-delivery is only a small part of its vision.  In Dec. 2016, the company launched DoorDash Drive, a service in which a restaurant can place the delivery order and indicate its destination. Drive is part of what company executives say is a point of competitive differentiation—a focus on the backend/infrastructure.

“With DoorDash Drive, we’re building the first logistics layer for restaurants, to solve deliveries that may or may not originate on the DoorDash marketplace,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu said in a recent interview with Fast Company. “A lot of times, an off-premise order, whether it’s takeout or delivery, doesn’t necessarily happen through an app. It happens over the telephone or in person. A merchant may want to fulfill those deliveries, and so why can’t there be a way for them to do that?”

Amazon’s Prime Now restaurant delivery is poised to provide major competition to DoorDash as an infrastructure provider. Already one of the world’s largest backend providers with AWS, Prime Now offers restaurants a merchant app which can accept, cancel or refund orders. No doubt, that’s the tip of the iceberg for what Amazon can provide its clients.

As a straight-up restaurant delivery company, DoorDash is much smaller than GrubHub with far less financial resources. In fact, DoorDash’s most recent investment round in 2016 dropped its valuation to $700 million, with share prices dropping 16% between its second and third fundraising campaign. The focus on money is crucial for a company intent on earning its reputation by building a comprehensive infrastructure to handle restaurant delivery logistics. DoorDash’s theory is that if an eatery can use its Dashers to handle inbound and outbound orders, the establishment can expand its catering business.

DoorDash Drive product manager Abhay Sukumaran says his company’s aim is to build a “programmatically accessible logistics network” that becomes a platform for its customers to add its own personalization such as linking it to a CRM system. “The goal is that this infrastructure becomes something that you can build other things on top of,” he told Fast Company.

Taking on delivery for restaurants and caterers could be a good market niche for DoorDash, but it will not be without its challenges. For example, a delivery person handling a large order on behalf of a food client becomes more of a representative of the establishment. While a restaurant can set rules for its own drivers regarding appearance and customer interactions, working with virtual delivery agents cuts out such important controls.

But there are delivery agents DoorDash can control—the robotic kind. U.K.-based Starship Technologies is working with DoorDash in Redwood City, CA to test a small number of its remote-controlled robots as surrogates for humans for short-distance food delivery.

DoorDash is by no means leaving its food delivery roots behind. They already operate in 300 cities in the U.S. and the company is adding liquor delivery and small-item grocery delivery from Whole Foods to its roster. That seems like a lot of the company’s plate as it tries to ride its infrastructure vision to either an IPO or big-ticket takeover.

Daimler Invests In Starship Technologies, Maker Of Sidewalk Delivery Robots

I wrote this morning that investors are beginning to look to robotics as an alternative to food delivery when it comes to food tech investment. As it turns out, some might want to invest in both at the same time.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Daimler Benz just invested $17 million in sidewalk robot delivery company Starship Technologies. Starship, which makes sidewalk robots to deliver food and groceries, was founded by two Skype cofounders in 2014.

I had a chance to talk with cofounder Ahti Heinla last fall, who told me that while everyone working on the future of home delivery is largely focused on self-driving cars and drones, they thought their approach would be easier to realize in the near term.

“Autonomous cars need to respond correctly to every possible situation that can arise on a road”, said Heinla. “With a sidewalk robot, when a robot encounters a situation that is too complicated for the automatic system to handle, the robot can simply stop on the sidewalk and call up the (human) operator to help. This is the beauty of using a robot moving at pedestrian speeds on a sidewalk.”

The $17 million investment from Daimler isn’t the carmaker’s first autonomous vehicle investment. Last year they invested in Matternet to jointly develop a van that would drive airborne drones close to the point of delivery and then let the drones deliver parcels to their final destination.

Unlike their drone effort, sidewalk robots present less regulatory hurdles. “We have a lot more operational freedom because, in a number of countries and U.S. states, we are completely legal and do not need any laws or regulations to be changed,” Heinla told the Wall Street Journal.

How Starship’s Hub & Spoke Robot Delivery Model Could Change Food Delivery

As semi-autonomous delivery robots wind their way through the streets of Greenwich, a borough of London, England, delivering take-out meals to local diners, we are witness to a small glimpse of how such technology will forever change the food ecosystem.

While Starship Technologies’ partnership with Just Eat, a home delivery service connecting consumers to their favorite restaurants, has received a significant amount of media attention, robotic delivery has far broader—and perhaps more socially significant—possibilities. Starship’s hub-and-spoke vision—that is a scenario where large amounts of goods—in this case, food—are taken to a central location after which an army of semi-autonomous robots take the wares the last quarter mile to individual homes.

Two obvious scenarios of this application of Starship’s innovation are home grocery delivery and bringing needed fresh food to a growing number of food deserts (areas outside the logistical reach of farms and farmers markets). For the home grocery startups such as Instacart, robots allow workers to focus more on careful curation than transporting sacks of produce, canned goods and other staples to local residents. Much the way newspapers set up substations where the daily papers are taken in bundles to individual districts where they are sorted and doled out to kids on bikes, supermarket chains or other food distribution can create a value-chain efficiency that benefits their bottom lines while providing a valuable service.

It’s clear that such a scenario is in Starship Technologies’ plans. In early September, the company announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz to develop “robot vans” which could bring the hub-and-spoke model to life. According to its press release, Starship said it will work with the German car manufacturer to build a transportation system in which specially-designed Sprinter vans will hold up to eight delivery robots. Based on location density and consumer needs, the vans will make their rounds dropping off, and later picking up, individual robotic delivery agents. While not mentioned in the release, a backend with carefully programmed robust logistical software and a “service center” where multiple robots can be simultaneously monitored will be needed.

A few enhancements would be needed to the current robot agent to truly optimize its capabilities. According to Starship Technologies, the semi-autonomous unit can hold up to 22 pounds and uses the insulation provided by the restaurant or its delivery service. In order to deal with larger deliveries—such as supplies to prep kitchens– or perishables, greater capacity and commercial insulation will need to be added to the units.

Moving from commercial needs to the greater good, the creation of a system to cut down on the growing number of food deserts will require more hands on deck. One of those additional hands might come in the form of delivery drones from the likes of Amazon, already in the business of efficient home delivery. The Seattle-based retail giant prides itself in leaving no address “unaddressable” when it comes to getting goods and services to the far reaches of the planet.

As with previous innovations, advances in food technology—particularly in logistics—first movers don’t always have an advantage. Lurking in the background—some not so subtly—are key players such as incumbents UPS and FedEx, as well as newcomers to the asynchronous delivery transport world including Uber and Lyft. In short order, autonomous vehicles of every shape and size will be in plentiful supply; how entrepreneurs in the food industry deploy them will separate the winners from the losers.

The Year In Food Robots

When you hear the words ‘food’ and ‘robot’ in the same sentence, chances are something like Softbank’s Pepper pops to mind, a modern Rosie-the-robot like humanoid with the hands and feet required to move around a kitchen and flip a pancake or two.

But when it comes to the kitchen, reality hasn’t quite caught up with the world envisioned by Hanna-Barbera, at least not yet. While there are companies who seem pretty serious about creating human-like creatures to take over our kitchen, the kitchen robot invasion, at least for the foreseeable future, will most likely consist of many more single-function machines that can automate tasks like drink mixing or stirring food in a pot rather than machines that act as a humanoid master chef (with one or two exceptions).

There’s also a big difference between what’s happening in the consumer kitchen compared to the pro kitchen.  While consumers will witness a slow and subtle invasion of single-purpose devices into our homes, in the pro kitchen we’re likely to see a variety of robotic systems put into use in restaurant environments over the next few years.

Below we take a look at what happened in food robots in 2016 and what to expect in 2017:

Consumer Cooking Robots in 2016: Failure To Boot

When it comes to consumer multifunction cooking robots, 2016 was mostly a non-starter. Despite showing at this year’s CES, Sereneti never shipped their product. OneCook, coming off a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2015 in which they raised over $100 thousand, missed its August ship date and has paused production without an update in months.

If you really want the closest thing to an all-in-one cooking robot today, your best bet is something like the Thermomix, a multi-cooker that I’ve been trying out and have discovered it does a whole lot of things and does them well. Sure, it may not have robotic arms to peel garlic or slice potatoes, but did you think you could automate everything in the kitchen?

Bartenderbots

If after a crazy year you feel you could use a drink, here’s some good news: the bartenderbots are coming.

Two startups, Bartesian and Somabar, are both in the process of bringing drink mixers to market that automate the process of making a cocktail.  Both use chambers to hold spirits, while the Bartesian uses a pod-based system to add flavors a la Keurig, while the Somabar has an infuser chamber to hold flavors that are added to the drink in the mixing process.

Both have told The Spoon they are planning to ship in first half of 2017.

Breadbots 

If drinking isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like a breadbot.

The Rotimatic, a robot that makes roti (Indian flatbread) and wraps began shipping in August. The wrap-robot is made by Zimplistic, a Singapore based startup that first showed off the product in January 2015 at CES. The company is working towards shipping the product to the US in 2017.

Another automated breadmaker, the Flatev, launched their Kickstarter campaign for a pod-based tortilla maker in May and indicated this month they are on track for an August 2017 ship date.

Ok, So Maybe We Do Have A Chefbot: Moley

If you’ve seen a story about a full kitchen robot in 2016, chances are it was about Moley. The startup, which touts itself as makers of the first robotic kitchen, has created a prototype of robotic chef that uses two fully robotic arms to mimic the movements of BBC master chef Tim Anderson.  While Moley appears to be the kind of robot that would work well in a pro kitchen, particularly if it was surrounded by a supporting cast of sous chefs to prepare ingredients (the Moley robot only prepares the final meal, but doesn’t do prep work or cleanup), the company envisions a consumer version of the Moley robot complete with two robotic arms, a built-in oven, a cooktop and a touchscreen to control the system.

While the idea of a fully robotic cooking robot is intriguing, I have my doubts about the readiness of the concept for consumer kitchens in 2017. Partly for practical considerations, as the Moley robot will require a large footprint, will require professional installation and, at this point, only performs part of the cooking process.  My biggest concern, however, is cost: while the company has yet to release pricing, I suspect it will cost somewhere north of five thousand (maybe much more) given it has a built in cooktop, stove and, oh yeah, robotic arms. All of this built-in tech means only those willing to spends lots of money on a futuristic concept will buy a Moley, provided it works well (and that’s a big if).

Despite these concerns, I am excited for the work Moley is doing, even though I’m not convinced the consumer market is ready for the product just yet.

You can see the Moley prototype at work below:

The robotic chef - Moley Robotics

Here Come The Probots

While the consumer cooking robotics market has surprisingly bare shelves in late 2016, the pro kitchen saw significant progress in 2016. There are a number of different ‘probots’ being developed for the restaurant and professional kitchen. Below are a few of the food (p)robot innovators we watched closely in 2016:

Casabots

Casabots is a salad assembly robot company that began in 2014 after founder and CEO Deepak Sekar had experimented with creating a food robot for his home. He soon realized that a more practical application of robotics was in professional environments and, before long, Sally was born. Sally, the company’s salad-assembly robot, looks a little (or a lot) like a refrigerator and allows the user to pick their ingredients using a touchscreen. Sekar told me that they are working with corporations like Aramark that run cafeterias to have Sally installed in high-volume work environments and expects to have Sally ready for market in early 2017.

Momentum Machines

Back in 2012, a new company emerged from food tech startup incubator Lemnos Labs with the goal of not helping humans in the world of fast food, but replacing them all together.

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” said Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas in an interview with Xconomy. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

A couple of years later, the company unveiled a prototype of a machine that could make up to 400 hamburgers per hour. The device, the tech details of which the company has kept largely under wraps, is described in the diagram below:

momentummachines-0

What’s fascinating about Momentum Machines technology is that while it works at industrial speed, it’s not mass producing the same burger over and over. It’s creating up to 400 custom burgers per hour. That’s right: up to 400 uniquely crafted, cooked, assembled and bagged hamburgers per hour.

And now, after going silent since 2014, the company created a buzz in June when it was discovered they’d applied for a building permit to create its first restaurant in San Francisco. While the roboburger joint has yet to open, we’re excited to head there in 2017 to try out a fully robot-produced hamburger.

Zume Pizza

The craziest – and perhaps most brilliant  – of all the pro food robots is from Zume Pizza. Founded by former Zynga President Alex Garden, Zume utilizes robotics in two points in the process (production and distribution) to get fresh machine-assisted artisan-style pizzas to consumers.

The pizza production process utilizes three robots and a conveyor belt system to produce pizzas at a fast rate for consumption in-restaurant or delivered to the home. The process includes three robots for production (Pepe for sauce dispensing, Marta for sauce spreading, and Bruno for loading and unloading pizza into the oven).  Humans work side-by-side in the Zume pizza kitchen, adding ingredients to the pizza, correcting any errors by the robots.

If you think the robot’s job done at Zume once it comes out of the kitchen, you’d be wrong. The company is working on creating large pizza trucks that utilize what it calls “Baking on the way” technology, a patented system that employs 56 individual ovens that are wired to initiate a cook just minutes before the arrival at the consumer’s door to give them an “out of the oven” experience.

The company, which opened its first restaurant this year, has applied for permits to operate its mobile pizza ovens on wheels and just this month raised close to $23 million in equity financing, so there’s a good chance we’ll see more restaurants – and possibly some pizza ovens on wheels – from Zume in 2017.

Starship 

While Starship isn’t really a food robot, there’s a good chance it’s robots – or ones like it – will help bring food to us in the future. That’s because Starship, a company cofounded by Skype cofounder Ahti Heinla, makes sidewalk delivery robots that are already being put into trials by large grocery stores to deliver food to consumers.

When I spoke to Heinla earlier this year, he made it clear he thought robotic delivery had huge advantages over the traditional method of humans and cars.

“With robots,” he said, ”the cost is in technology, manufacturing, and maintenance. The safest bet you can do is that technology is getting cheaper all the time. It’s just a question of time before this (delivery) will be one dollar, fifty cents.”

What’s interesting is Starship robots still require humans to control them – much like today’s drones – in the process of a delivery. Heinla envisions a human remotely controlling up to 10 or so Starship sidewalk delivery robots at some point, but unlike cars or even drones, what makes these robots ready for delivery deployment today is how slow they move.

“With a sidewalk robot, when a robot encounters a situation that is too complicated for the automatic system to handle, the robot can simply stop on the sidewalk and call up the (human) operator to help. This is the beauty of using a robot moving at pedestrian speeds on a sidewalk.”

Looking Forward

2016 saw significant advancement in food and cooking robotics. While the professional kitchen is further along in the food robot revolution in part because efforts to add robotics to centralized and professional food production facilities have excited for decades, we think 2017 could be an exciting year for the consumer market too as Moley, bartenderbots and even cooking robots like Sereneti finally make their debut. Investor interest in both sectors seems to be rising, so we also expect some new companies to debut in 2017 and beyond that bring robotics to the kitchen.

Lastly, there is a whole bunch of innovation going on in cooking automation and food 3D printing, areas which often overlap with kitchen robotics (take the pancakebot, for example). We expect those areas to be equally exciting in 2017.

Stay tuned and check back here at The Spoon as we cover the food robot revolution – and more – in 2017.

Wanted: Robot Delivery Drivers

You’re sitting at home, enjoying a quiet Saturday when you hear a faint buzzing outside. You peer out the window to investigate, and the sound becomes more distinct, like the hum of a small motor. Suddenly, you hear a vague thud. You open the door and a box appears – your delivery has arrived. But there’s no delivery truck outside and no sign of any human being around. Chances are, you’ve just experienced your first robot delivery. Welcome to the future.

Robotic delivery – whether by land or air –  may be replacing your friendly UPS delivery driver, but it’s also creating its own unique set up jobs in the new economy. With big names like Amazon investing huge dollars and efforts into programs like Prime Air, the job of delivery truck driver might be cool again. Instead of driving around a large truck and walking door to door, robot delivery operators of the future will be sitting in a comfortable chair, miles away from the homes they’re delivering to, with a remote control and a set of complex maps and coordinates, creating routes for their robotic drivers – ground or air –  to complete.

Startups like Starship, an Estonia-based drone delivery organization created by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, were recently hiring for drone delivery drivers. From the job description, Starship was looking for people to oversee a fleet of largely autonomous robots, create navigation paths and troubleshoot when the drone runs into an issue only human intelligence can solve.

“We are creating 99% autonomous robots, which means we outsource the difficult decisions to humans who are able to solve different social and traffic situations.”

Starship has some unique features that set it apart from other robotic delivery methods such as drones. For one, the unmanned vehicles are said to produce zero carbon emissions, and operate on the ground only, delivering in five to thirty minutes from any given local store. Starship says this is ten to fifteen times faster than alternative last-mile delivery methods like unmanned air crafts. And the company touts its combination of advanced driving software with actual humans to ensure that any obstacle or challenge are overcome. From their launch press release, “…navigation and obstacle avoidance software enables the robots to drive autonomously, but they are also overseen by human operators who can step in to ensure safety at all times.”

Starship robots are driven on the ground and sidewalk based – giving the robot operators unique challenges in keeping the bot safe from human interaction while en route. One of the things that Starship doesn’t mention is what happens to these land-bound vehicles if they encounter humans who try to interfere? We all know that one guy whose first reaction to seeing a robot delivery pod is to try to get in its way or mess with it in some manner. So essentially the job of an operator is to make sure the robots don’t mess up – or that some jerk on Essex Street doesn’t kick the bot onto its back like a helpless turtle.

Starship is looking for people who have a keen interest in technology and have the ability to stay alert while staring at a computer screen for hours at a time. Does this unique skillset sound familiar to any one group of humans? Perhaps the drone and robot delivery economy is carving out new career opportunities for video game enthusiasts. Sitting in a darkened room, diligently watching computer screens and mapping out paths and routes in case something goes awry sounds a lot like what gamers do every day in a variety of strategy-based scenarios. According to Statista, the number of active gamers worldwide? A staggering 1.78 million. That’s quite the applicant pool to choose from.

Land-bound robotic delivery is interesting; historically, federal and international regulations have made commercial drone usage challenging due to FAA requirements that companies have an operator with a pilot’s license and keep each drone within line of sight. In the U.S. this made it expensive and challenging to hire operators and use drones for everyday things like grocery delivery. Recent changes have relaxed these rules a bit and made air delivery for drones more possible. As for Starship – they have a unique advantage – their robots don’t need to fly.

The company began just two years ago and have already started testing their 30 beta robots in big markets from London to Seattle. How have they gotten so much done in such little time? According to a NextMarket podcast interview, Heinla said because they’ve focused on “creating basic sidewalk delivery robots” that move at a walking pace and don’t rely on computers to make every single decision, it was easier to create and test sooner. If any automation on the robot traveling at approximately six km/hour fails, its human operator can step in and complete the delivery without incident.

While automation technologies, artificial intelligence and robots may replace jobs in certain sectors – like food service and restaurants along with manufacturing and white collar industries, they’re also bringing with them different kinds of jobs. They might be less focused on brute labor and more on visual, spatial and technological skills – but certainly a trend to watch for those who predict job trends in the future. Meanwhile, Starship proves that robot technology that relies to a degree on human intelligence might have a shot at being first to market and to scale, while opening up a new kind of job in an AI-powered economy.

How Science Fiction Inspired Skype Cofounder To Start A Sidewalk Robot Company

In 2003, Ahti Heinla sat in a small office in Tallin, the capital city of Estonia, writing software.  The program he was working on was called Skype, which would go on to become the first mass-market Internet calling software, representing some 40% of all international calling traffic, and change the world along the way.

Now, 13 years and a few hundred yards away in downtown Tallin, Heinla is changing the world once again. Only now, instead of communication software, he’s doing it with robots.

Minority Report As Muse

Heinla’s newest company is called Starship, which he cofounded two years ago with Skype cofounder Janus Friis. The original idea for Starship came to Heinla and Friis as they were trying to think of ways in which they could change the world and, like so many of today’s big thinkers, found inspiration from science fiction movies.

“People think it can’t be done today, that we need some magical technology that doesn’t exist today, but that isn’t actually true.”

“When you look at science fiction movies like Minority Report and other movies set 10, 20, 30 years from now, nobody thinks 30 years from now there will be people knocking on your door with a delivery,” Heinla told me for the NextMarket podcast. “Everybody imagines it’s going to be flying cars and we realized that part of that revolution can be done today.”

 Heinla explained most people assume futuristic advancements such as those we see in movies aren’t possible, but that the technology is much closer than most realize.

“People think it can’t be done today, that we need some magical technology that doesn’t exist today, but that isn’t actually true.”

Heinla and his team realized that by focusing on making low-cost delivery robots that utilized humans to assist the robots when they encountered problems, the technology could be produced and brought to market today and not a few decades from now. Two years later, they’ve created their first 30 robots, tested them in urban environments from London to Seattle, and have signed up their first partners.

Moving Faster Than Google

Moving from brainstorm to the brink of a commercial rollout in just two years is an impressive feat, especially compared to other high-profile robotic vehicle efforts such as Google’s autonomous car initiative, something the search giant has been working on for the better part of a decade.

How did Starship do it? According to Heinla, they were able to do it because they focused on creating basic sidewalk delivery robots that moved at pedestrian speeds and weren’t 100% reliant on computers for every decision. In other words, slow speeds and humans made up the secret sauce that makes Starship’s fleet of robots possible today.

“Autonomous cars need to respond correctly to every possible situation that can arise on a road”, said Heinla. “With a sidewalk robot, when a robot encounters a situation that is too complicated for the automatic system to handle, the robot can simply stop on the sidewalk and call up the (human) operator to help. This is the beauty of using a robot moving at pedestrian speeds on a sidewalk.”

The human operators Heinla is referring to are Starship employees who monitor the movements of the robots remotely as they traverse along the sidewalk. Because the movement of the robot is slow (human speed) and semi-autonomous, it doesn’t require continuous monitoring. This allows a human monitor to multitask and operate multiple robots at one time. According to Heinla, their human robot guides will be monitor up to three robots to start, but he expects that number to go up to 100 robots as the robots get more intelligent.

“The minimum wage isn’t decreasing, it’s increasing. The majority of citizens (in the future) will not use it (human delivery). It’s too expensive.”

The Cost is in the Technology

Even though Starship uses human assistance as a way to get to market faster, Heinla believes the company can still ride a cost curve dictated by Moore’s law rather than human wages since their model relies largely on robot delivery, whereas today’s delivery business depends on a human showing up at your door.

“The minimum wage isn’t decreasing, it’s increasing,” said Heinla. “At something like $10 per delivery, the majority of citizens (in the future) will not use it (human delivery). It’s too expensive.”

This long term cost advantage relative to today’s all human delivery network doesn’t bode well for the status quo. A recent study by McKinsey predicted automation – or robots – will take away a large number of service jobs, in particular those that don’t require any special training. Delivery jobs today are somewhat unique in that they usually require a human to traverse through the world, but in the world Heinla is creating, delivery jobs will be done almost entirely with robots.

“With robots,” he said, ”the cost is in technology, in manufacturing and maintenance. The safest bet you can do is that technology getting cheaper all the time. It’s just a question of time before this (delivery) will be one dollar, fifty cents.”

Looking forward, Heinla believes they will have a fleet of approximately one thousand robots a year from now, and expects to have Starship robots in the US later this year.