Autonomously guided vehicles are now common in warehouses and factories. Soon, they may be on city streets, delivering fast food and gourmet meals to homes by Uber Eats, Pizza Hut, 7-11 and others. Can small delivery robots reliably get time-sensitive deliveries like fast food to consumers as efficiently as human delivery drivers? We’ll know soon.
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Episode Transcript:
Home delivery of restaurant meals has been around longer than anyone can remember, but in North America it’s traditionally been associated with fast food chains selling things like pizza and hamburgers.
Uber Eats pioneered a new system for the delivery platform as independent of the serving restaurant, and today millions of individuals can order everything from a Big Mac to a gourmet meal for home delivery.
But that delivery may soon arrive by robot. After extensive testing in California, where 200 Los Angeles restaurants participated, 2,000 Serve Robotics sidewalk AGV’s will be deployed in multiple markets across the U.S. Since deliveries began in the Los Angeles test area in 2022, robotic deliveries have grown over 30 percent month over month, and the system is ready for widespread rollout.
The robots operate at SAE Level 4 autonomy, meaning that they operate without human intervention under almost all circumstances. The Serve system operates on the NVIDIA Jetson platform, compact form factor high-performance computer modules designed by NVIDIA specifically for autonomous motion applications. The LIDAR sensors are by Ouster, with 90-meter resolution on targets with only 10 percent reflectivity, the maximum range of 200 meters. Serve has not announced the unit’s range or run time per battery charge.
Unusual conditions such as police tape or construction barriers will be navigated by intervention from a remote operator.
Serve Robotics is developing similar services with Walmart, Pizza Hut and 7-Eleven. While small autonomously guided vehicles are now commonplace in warehousing and manufacturing, operation in public spaces presents multiple additional challenges. The small robots will use sidewalks and pedestrian crosswalks, must dodge multiple potential obstacles and significantly, represent a theft or vandalism risk. Onboard cameras could be used to mitigate the risk of crime, but it’s unknown whether the aggregation of this kind of video data will be legal in all jurisdictions.
Autonomous food delivery robots offer another advantage: the ability to aggregate valuable real-time data about consumer buying habits, street by street. This information is itself valuable, or may be fed back into personalized, targeted advertising through handheld devices. Robots themselves may in fact become mobile billboards.
Robot pizza delivery appears poised to replace humans with a system that generates useful information as well as a hotter pie… and there’s no need to tip them.