DoorDash’s New Delivery Robot Rolls Out Into the Big, Cruel World
Application -based companies have published publicly the money potential for autonomous vehicles for years. These companies have poured billions of dollars in the recruitment and management of independent entrepreneurs who make delivery and driving for them, and millions of others ensuring that they will remain independent entrepreneurs and not employees. What if businesses could skip all of this? What if the robots did all the work, or at least a part?
However, with today’s announcement, Doordash throws its fate in an industry that has faced agitated waters. And, of course, the threat of public kicks.
Slowdown
The delivery robots were excited at the start of the pandemic covids as a solution to this other very human contagion problem. Since then, however, Amazon and Fedex have abandoned their delivery robot projects; Others working on delivery robots have pivoted software or industrial uses. The remaining companies have mainly focused on small deployments on university campuses or in some selected cities, and these do not seem to grow as quickly as hope.
The Estonian Society Starship Technologies, the largest still standing in the delivery robot area, has found a niche operating mainly on university campuses, where the streets and sidewalks are wide, well maintained and relatively friendly, and where those who are desperately looking for pizzas and burritos at 2 o’clock in the prices. According to 400 robots, the postmata spin-off was launched in 2017, but only built 400 robots, according to its last financial adventures, with objectives to build 2,000 at the end of the year.
Compare this with the growth of autonomous vehicles. Although Robotaxi services are always limited to a handful of world cities, they collect and deposit customers up to hundreds of thousands of rides per week.
The reason for the slower growth of delivery robots is actually quite simple, explains Bern Grush, executive director of the Urban Robotics Foundation for non -profit: “You try to solve a much more difficult problem with from afar, much less capital and by far, much less calcular.”
Consider the technical challenge that Dot has in advance: Doordash says that the robot is built to operate on sidewalks, cycle paths and roads. It is supposed to pilot and get out of the parking lots to collect food and navigate in the aisles and the apartment complexes to place it. This means that the software must “understand”, predict the movement of and bypass a remarkable number of situations, vehicles and to be living beings: cars, trucks, school bus, strollers, children’s bikes, aggressive mopeds, red armchairs, cyclists, competitive cyclists. And again and again.
