While it has piloted its autonomous robot deliveries, Uber Eats has now started a fully-functional autonomous service in several cities. The food delivery service was already testing its technology in Los Angeles, but it was a limited pilot. Now, it has fully launched its autonomous robot deliveries in Miami, specifically the suburb of Dadeland, in partnership with Cartken.
Read: Wait, what? Pornhub was on YouTube?
Uber Eats uses AI-powered robots that make deliveries from select retailers, and it will expand further in the Miami area and other cities in 2023. Its pilot in Los Angeles was started in May this year, in conjunction with Motional and Serve Robotics (which spun out of Uber). Now, the company has also agreed on a ten year deal with Nuro for autonomous food deliveries, beginning in Texas and California.
Cartken also works with Grubhub on college campus deliveries. Its six-wheeled robots use NVIDIA Jetson tech along with sensors and cameras to help them avoid collisions and take routes with fewer hazards. The machines, which are built by Magna, have a cargo capacity of 1.5 cubic feet, which is roughly the same as two full paper grocery bags. They can travel at up to six miles per hour, depending on conditions and the environment.
Cartken is an Oakland-based AI company founded by a team of ex-Google engineers, and has built six-wheeled robots to navigate the sidewalks of various cities to deliver. Sidewalk delivery robots are becoming a familiar sight on many college campuses in the USA and even a few towns and cities. There have been some notable examples of robots getting stuck in the snow, being run over by cars, or catching fire.
Infamously, Uber had developed its own fleet of autonomous vehicles with the intention to eventually replace all of its human drivers, but the program was shut down after a woman was killed by one of the company’s vehicles in 2017.