Status of Autonomous Last-Mile

 Had wondered the status of this, after I saw some neighborhood bans reported.  have even volunteered to look at the Nuro example and report on it in situ.  Risk of sharing sidewalks with people.  Coming back? 

Last-Mile Delivery Robots Making a Comeback After Initial Bans  

July 22, 2021 , By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI Trends  

The last-mile delivery market for autonomous delivery robots is poised to make a comeback, with startups raising money and partnerships working to get needed permission from local governments.  

The autonomous vehicle delivery market was interrupted in 2017, when the city of San Francisco instituted a ban. Some pedestrians had complained that the delivery robots crowded the sidewalks and posed a hazard to humans.  

About a month after the first bot rolled down the sidewalk, San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee proposed a ban on the use of the technology, citing public safety concerns, according to an account in ZDNet.    

“I resolutely believe that our sidewalks should be prioritized for humans,” Yee stated to the San Francisco Examiner. “We do not allow bicycles and Segways on our sidewalks.” (Segways were banned on city sidewalks in 2002, an action criticized as heavy-handed at the time.) Yee did not have the votes to pass the ban, so he settled for strict limitations at that time.  

He had heard from many pedestrians and some community activists about the risks of the delivery vehicles.  

“Sidewalks, I believe, are not playgrounds for the new remote controlled toys of the clever to make money and eliminate jobs,” stated Lorraine Petty, an activist with the community group Senior and Disability Action, at the hearing on Yee’s proposed rules. “They’re for us to walk.”  

“Not every innovation is all that great for society,” Yee stated at the hearing.  

Two years later, in 2019, grocery delivery company Postmates was given the first permit in San Francisco to test sidewalk delivery robots. The company worked with Yee for two years to get it done, according to a report in TechCrunch. 

The Postmates rover, called Serve, is semi-autonomous, with a human pilot monitoring the fleet and able to interact with customers via video chat. The robot, which has Velodyne Lidar sensors and an Nvidia Xavier processor, can carry 50 lbs and travel 30 miles on a single battery charge.  

The company worked on making Serve friendly. “We are spending a lot of time going in and refining and inventing new ways that Serve can communicate,” stated Ken Kocienda, an Apple veteran who had joined Postmates in 2019. (He now is product architect at Humane of San Francisco.) “We want to make it socially intelligent. We want people, when they see Serve going down the street, to smile at it and to be happy to see it there.”     ... ' 

Chipotele Wants to use Autonomous Nuro Delivery

 Surprising to me, given the number of delivery services out there.   Note the use of Nuro, which many retailers have tested.   Still want to  see one of these operating autonomously, have not heard much new of late about its operations. 

Chipotle is the latest company to get behind robot cars. Here’s why

Chipotle just invested big in an autonomous delivery company. Their CTO explains why and what the process will look like.

By Mark Wilson

Nuro is the autonomous vehicle company that big brands love. With a focus on delivery, Nuro’s cute, driverless vehicle that’s optimized to hold goods has attracted partnerships with Walmart, Kroger, and CVS, along with over $1 billion in funding since 2017.

This week, Chipotle joined the list of Nuro’s backers, investing an undisclosed amount in the company’s latest round of funding.

Nuro has been a golden child of the startup world since 2017. Like many other AV startups, it’s been testing its technologies tentatively over several years to polish them for wider release. The strategy seems to be paying off for Nuro. Its Nuro R2 vehicle has become the first autonomous car approved to operate without a driver on roads across three different states (California, Arizona, and Texas).  ... " 

California Approves Nuro for Delivery

Have been following Nuro for some time.  With showed
an interesting looking vehicle.  Especially by the examination by Kroger.  An autonomous delivery method. 

Nuro can now charge for robot deliveries in California  By Mitchell Clark   in theVerge 

The permit allows them to charge for human-free deliveries

Nuro is now the first company in California that’s allowed to operate autonomous cars commercially (via TechCrunch). The company received a permit that allowed it to test its robots earlier this year, but this permit will allow the firm to actually charge people for the service.

According to a Medium post by Nuro’s chief legal and policy officer, the company is planning to “announce [its] first deployment in California with an established partner.” Who that partner is remains to be seen, but it’s likely to be a delivery service that can make use of Nuro’s completely driverless Prius vehicles, though the company plans on (literally) rolling out its own custom R2 bots later on.  ... "  

CVS Health Testing Nuro Delivery

This particular Nuro delivery systems is being tested by a number of companies.  See a number of images at the tag.

CVS Health Tests Self-Driving Vehicle Prescription Delivery
Associated Press
Tom Murphy
May 28, 2020

CVS Health will test prescription delivery via self-driving vehicles to customers in Houston beginning this month, in partnership with the Nuro robotics company. A spokesperson for the drugstore chain said prescriptions will be delivered within an hour of ordering from a Houston-area store; customers will have to confirm their identity in order to unlock the vehicle to obtain their delivery. Customers can select the Nuro delivery option when they fill their prescriptions online, and track the vehicle's progress through a Nuro portal. Federal regulators earlier this year granted Nuro temporary approval to operate autonomous delivery vehicles on public roads for the first time without human occupants. .... "

Nuro Autonomous Delivery Vehicle Approved for Test

The intriguingly designed robotic grocery delivery system takes a step forward in testing.   According to the article these are vehicles without direct human control.  In test by sever restaurants and retailers.

California Allows Startup Nuro to Test Driverless Delivery Vehicles
Reuters   Munsif Vengattil; Ayanti Bera

California's Department of Motor Vehicles has authorized an autonomous technology startup to test two driverless delivery vehicles in nine cities. Startup Nuro will use its driverless low-speed R2 vehicle to begin conducting deliveries with local retail partners. The startup has been testing autonomous vehicles with safety drivers on the state's roads since 2017. Said Nuro's David Estrada, "Our R2 fleet is custom-designed to change the very nature of driving, and the movement of goods, by allowing people to remain safely at home while their groceries, medicines, and packages, are brought to them." In February, Nuro was granted permission by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to deploy up to 5,000 low-speed electric delivery vehicles without any human controls in Houston.  .... " 

Autonomous Vehicles to Bypass Safety for Testing?

Note the specific mention of Nuro, which is testing with Kroger and others.  I am imagining how it might work in a suburb like ours.

U.S. Lets Autonomous Vehicle Bypass Safety Rules
Associated Press via CACM
Tom Krisher

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has granted temporary approval to Nuro, a robotics company, to run low-speed autonomous delivery vehicles designed with no accommodations for human drivers. The vehicles lack mirrors, windshield wipers, steering wheels, and brake pedals. The approval marks the first time the federal agency has approved a company's request to deploy self-driving vehicles that do not meet the same safety standards for cars and trucks driven by humans. Under the temporary approval, Nuro must submit real-time safety reports to NHTSA, and will have to hold regular meetings with the agency and keep in contact with the community where the vehicles will travel. NHTSA will use its enforcement powers if it finds any evidence of an unreasonable risk to safety.  ... " 

Nuro Robotics Wants to Deliver Autonomously

More on the company Nuro, working with Dominos, Wal-Mart, Kroger and others to test the idea of autonomous delivery of product.  Are we ready?

We're Nuro
We believe that great technology should benefit everyone. The team at Nuro is accelerating a future where robots make life easier and help us connect to the people and things we love. Together, we’re pushing the boundaries of robotics to improve human life.

Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu have devoted their careers to robotics and machine learning, most recently as Principal Engineers at Google’s self-driving car project (now Waymo). They founded Nuro in 2016 to harness the power of robotics and artificial intelligence to solve new challenges at a global scale.

Nuro’s team is made up of the very best minds from academia and industry. We are veterans in robotics, consumer electronics, autonomous vehicles, and automotive — from Google, Waymo, Apple, Uber, Tesla, and GM. We come from some of the world's top universities — including Berkeley, Cambridge, Caltech, Chicago, CMU, Freiburg, Fudan, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, Toronto, U of M, UNC, and Waterloo. Members of our team have won numerous world competitions — including DARPA Urban Challenge, DARPA Robotics Challenge, and ImageNet.
... ' 

Wal-Mart Thinking Robot Delivery

Saw this earlier by other retailers like Kroger.  Are we ready for autonomous delivery?   How will this coexist with traffic in the suburbs and city?   The liabilities? 

Walmart Teams With Nuro's Robot Cars to Deliver Groceries in Houston
The Washington Post
By Peter Holley

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

Robotics company Nuro has announced a partnership with Walmart to pilot-test grocery delivery via robot vehicles in Houston. Nuro already is delivering merchandise across the city from brands such as Kroger and Domino's. The sensor-equipped Toyota Priuses it uses have been mapping the city in the course of their deliveries, collecting data about traffic and customer shopping patterns. Nuro said the Walmart partnership will boost its insights into shopping patterns, and give the company a competitive edge by answering basic questions about autonomous delivery. Nuro's Sola Lawal said, "We want to understand how different demographics interact with and feel about the robots."  .... 

Pizza Robotics is at the Door

More traffic for  the suburbs?

Nuros Pizza Robot Will Bring You a Domino's Pie
By Alex Davies in Wired  

Nuro's vehicle looks like an avant-garde handbag, but it’s actually a little robot that will soon start hauling pizza around Houston 

Nuro, the self-driving delivery company started in 2016 by a trio of Google veterans, is moving into the pizza game. Later this year, Nuro’s robot will start delivering Domino’s pies and cheesy breads to customers in the Houston area.

The robot in question is the R2, the yet-to-be-revealed version of Nuro’s R1 vehicle, which is about half the size of a sedan and resembles an avant-garde handbag. It’s made exclusively for carrying goods—there’s nowhere for a human to fit, let alone drive. Since last year, it has been moving groceries for Kroger in Scottsdale, Arizona, and in Houston. For this Domino’s deal, hungry robophobes can opt for a human delivery. Those OK with the robot will be issued a code to enter into a screen on the bot that opens one of its two compartments so they can collect their melted cheese and whatnot.

For Domino’s, the Nuro deal is just the latest in a long string of tech-enabled delivery tactics. In 2017, it ran a short pilot with Ford’s autonomous vehicles in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and worked with Starship Technologies to greet its customers with sidewalk delivery robots in Europe. The year before that, in New Zealand, it used drones to move its pies through the skies. Because while you may think of it as the joint that kept you from starving after the college cafeteria closed, Domino’s is in fact an international logistics giant—one facing a driver shortage, with about 10,000 positions open in the US. It’s hoping robots, drones, or whatever else scoots out of Silicon Valley can help.   .... " 

Nuro Moves Forward

This is the company Kroger is working with to pilot autonomous delivery.    Following closely.

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro picks up $940M from SoftBank   By Maria Deutscher in SiliconAngle

For a market that didn’t exist a couple years ago, the nascent autonomous delivery market is certainly drawing a lot of investor interest.

Nuro Inc., a startup looking to use self-driving vehicles to pick up groceries for consumers, today announced that it has closed a staggering $940 million investment from SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund. The round reportedly gives it a valuation of $2.7 billion. It has raised a total of more than $1 billion from SoftBank, Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital.

Mountain View, California-based Nuro was founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, two veterans of Google LLC parent Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car initiative. They worked on the project as principal engineers before the search giant spun it off into an independent business unit. Aurora Innovation inc., an autonomous driving startup led by another veteran of Alphabet’s self-driving car initiative, last week raised a $530 million funding round of its own.

In contrast with Aurora, which is taking a somewhat secretive approach with its efforts, Nuro hasn’t shied away from the industry spotlight. The startup made headlines last year when it announced a partnership with Kroger Co. to pilot an autonomous delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona. After initially using Toyota Prius hybrids to ferry groceries to buyers, Nuro expanded the fleet in December with an internally developed robot dubbed the R1.

It’s about half the size of a car and has two storage compartments with space for three shopping bags each. This makes the vehicle larger than most of the other delivery robots on the market, including Amazon.com’s recently unveiled Scout rover.  ... " 

Toaster on Wheels from Kroger Delivers

A Toaster on Wheels to Deliver Groceries? Self-Driving Tech Tests Practical Uses 

The New York Times   by Cade Metz

Slow uptake of driverless passenger services is spurring the autonomous industry to experiment with offerings like food deliveries from small, self-driving vehicles. One example is an unmanned electric car from the Nuro startup that transports groceries from a local chain to customers in Scottsdale, AZ. Nuro's Dave Ferguson said, "If we can reduce the cost of these deliveries and get them to you faster than you could make the trip yourself, there would be no reason for you to get in the car." More recently, Postmates in San Francisco announced plans to dispatch robotic shopping carts with blinking digital eyes onto sidewalks for similar deliveries. Ferguson said Nuro can increase the margin of error on roads by making the delivery vehicle much smaller than a normal-sized car. ... (Full article requries registration) 

Kroger Goes Live with Self-Driving Delivery

Seeing these live, commonly, will be the view of a new world.

Kroger goes live with self-driving delivery vehicles
Supermarket giant sells You Technology digital coupon unit
By Russell Redman

In a pair of technology announcements today, The Kroger Co. said it has started using unmanned vehicles for online grocery deliveries and formed a new relationship for managing digital offers.

At a Fry’s Food Store in Scottsdale, Ariz., Kroger launched what it calls the first-ever autonomous vehicle delivery service available to the general public. The service follows a successful pilot with Nuro, a Mountain View, Calif.-based robotics and artificial intelligence specialist, that began in August.

Related: Kroger to pilot unmanned grocery delivery vehicles

The test with Nuro in Scottsdale, which made almost a thousand grocery deliveries, used a fleet of self-driving Prius cars accompanied by vehicle operators, Kroger said. With the official launch of the service, the delivery fleet is being expanded to include the Nuro R1 custom unmanned vehicle.

With no driver or passengers, the R1 travels on public roads and only transports goods. The vehicle has been in development since 2016.  ... "

Kroger to Build Robotic Warehouse for Home Delivery

Kroger continues to advance.   Now testing home delivery robotic warehouses.   Also direct robotic delivery testing in Arizona. The latter being a particularly tough challenge, given its need for autonomous decision making in varying environments.

Kroger announces first US robotic warehouse for home delivery in Monroe in Cincinnati.com

The Cincinnati-based supermarket chain will spend $55 million constructing the facility that will create 410 new jobs.

Called a customer fulfillment center, the facility will be heavily automated with "innovative robotics technology, allowing for next-generation automated storage and retrieval." Also nicknamed a "shed," the center will be 335,000 square feet – two to three times the size of the typical Kroger Marketplace. ... "

Also more in Chain Store Age.

Kroger Rolls out Autonomous Delivery Test

Not completely driverless, and not using the Nuro autonomous 'shelf' (at the right)   But still it shows the seriousness of Kroger about the idea.  Still think a completely autonomous system will  get in the way of regulations and roadway management  issues, so it may take some time to have this concept happen.  But at least now you can go and see this mockup of the idea.   I live just across and down the street from a Kroger, so I volunteer to manage a local test and publicity. 

Kroger starts testing self-driving grocery delivery in Arizona in Engadget

You can try it at one store in Scottsdale.

You now have a chance to try Kroger's self-driving grocery delivery... if you happen to live in the right part of Arizona. The chain has launched its driverless delivery pilot at a single Fry's Food Stores location in Scottsdale, giving you a chance to receive foodstuffs courtesy of Nuro's autonomous vehicles. Order through the Fry's website or app and the robotic courier can deliver either the same day or next day for a $6 flat fee. You'll have to live in the same 85257 ZIP code, so you can't make them drive across town just to satisfy your curiosity.

Sadly, you won't see Nuro's custom R1 vehicle (above) roll up to your home in the earliest stages of the pilot -- it'll be a modified Toyota Prius instead, and the very first phase will include a just-in-case driver. The purpose-built machines will only start delivering your goods sometime in the fall, after they've completed certification and testing. ... "

Kroger to Launch Driverless Delivery!

Quite a remarkable thing for a major retailer!

America’s largest supermarket chain is launching a fully driverless delivery service

Kroger is teaming up with Nuro, a startup founded by two veterans of Google’s self-driving team  By Andrew J. Hawkins   @andyjayhawk  in theVerge ..... "

Not a car, but a driverless van of sorts.  See more about Nuro.