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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Tortoise

Self Point and Tortoise Team Up to Offer Grocers a Robot Delivery Option

Self Point and Tortoise announced today that they have partnered up to make same-day robot delivery available to local grocers.

Self Point makes digital commerce software that allows grocery retailers to build their own websites that integrate point of sale, inventory management and order fulfillment. Tortoise makes a teleoperated electric cart built for transporting heavy loads like groceries. With the Tortoise integration, Self Point’s grocery customers can add robots as a delivery option on orders.

You can check out a video of the Tortoise in operation here:

Tortoise Cart TikTok

Tortoise sets itself apart from other players in the last mile robotic delivery space such as Starship, Refraction and Nuro in a couple of ways. First Tortoise is proudly not autonomous. All Tortoise robots are teleoperated remotely by human drivers. By taking this approach, Tortoise believes it can get to market faster by avoiding some of the hesitations some local governments have with the safety self-driving robots on city sidewalks.

Tortoise is also not positioning itself as an on-demand delivery service. Tortoise is not meant to get you groceries in under a half hour. It’s meant to be scheduled ahead of time. Though it does appear that with Self Point, Tortoise robots will be available same day.

The Self Point + Tortoise partnership is certainly coming at the right time. Earlier this year, the pandemic pushed online grocery shopping sales, and by extension grocery delivery, to record-shattering new heights. Though those numbers have come down in recent months, grocery e-commerce is expected to represent 21.5 percent of total grocery by 2025.

As such we’ll see more grocers going online and needing more options for order fulfillment. Walmart has been doing automated grocery deliveries with Nuro in Houston, TX. Refraction has been doing grocery delivery in Ann Arbor, MI, and in Modesto, CA. And Save Mart is using a fleet of 30 Starship robots to make deliveries.

The robotic delivery market is definitely heating up, and it’s not to hard to imagine through deals like the one with Self Point, Tortoise could arrive in a bunch of neighborhoods rather quickly.

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.