Autonomous Vehicles Are Making Deliveries in South Austin: We have seen the future, and it brought pizza – News
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After a year on the streets of his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the REV-1 has joined the South Congress audience (Courtesy Refraction AI)
Your new neighbor Elon Musk, visionary as he may be, went to great lengths to back up his grand lecture on autonomous vehicles. In 2016, he promised that a fully driverless Tesla could be “ordered” from New York to Los Angeles within two years. Last week he tweeted: “Didn’t expect it to be this difficult, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect.” But he’s still trying, which Uber and Lyft and others who have had robot car fever are not. Recently, more attention has been paid to applications where AVs seem to be better able to do useful things at the moment. How to deliver pizza.
That’s why Refraction AI, a robot last mile logistics developer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has joined the crowd in South Congress with its REV-1 vehicles and Southside Flying Pizza orders in the zip code 78704 brought to customers. The REV-1 has three wheels, can hold groceries for a week or a pile of pizzas, fits on the bike path, goes up to 15 km / h, works in bad weather and at night, is largely contactless (there is a keyboard to type a lock / unlock code) and has a cute WALL-E vibe that is likely to appeal to both customers and investors.
Even before the pandemic, culinary and food systems professionals valued the long-term potential for AV delivery of both finished foods to customers and raw foods to kitchens. Now that thousands of restaurants have stepped up their take-away game, increased demand, staff shortages, and the pursuit of zero waste and lower carbon footprints make the REV-1 less of an absurd novelty.
Refraction AI’s REV-1 fleet is still small, both in Austin and at home in Ann Arbor, where they’ve been since early last year, and the technology is still experimental; It may be more accurate right now to call them “AV drones” rather than real robots. When they were first introduced in Austin, each REV-1 was looked after by a “guardian” who travels remotely and can take control or stop it. they can also be guided by remote-controlled pilots who tackle trickier driving tasks like zebra crossings. However, a 100 pound vehicle moving at a speed of 15 miles per hour with a stopping distance of 5 feet poses a much lower risk than many other moving things on the South Congress.
Like Tesla and Google’s sister AV company Waymo, Refraction AI has learned that real-world operations in uncontrolled environments are complicated. “This is going to cost a lot more money and a lot more time than we thought,” Luke Schneider, CEO of Refraction AI, told CNBC last week. But even a semi-autonomous drone delivery service with human surveillance could occupy a technological and economic sweetspot between the options currently available instead of always being several years away like this Tesla.
What does the city, which is ultimately responsible for the traffic management and safety of the South Congress, think of this? Unlike Austin’s experience with scooters and e-bikes, where the city has used its licensing authority to restrict vendors but also worked with them to refine how micromobility can best work, Refraction AI and everyone else need to be in the Lieferspiel did not get permission from the city. The state law passed in 2019 lays down basic regulations for “personal delivery devices” and “mobile carrying devices”, which differ fundamentally according to whether the (required) operator is nearby or far away.
These are not “vehicles” in the sense of Texas law and could range in size from Amazon’s tiny four-wheeled drones to the heavily advertised Domino’s pizza robot cars – an AV model called Nuro R2 – that are and are the size of golf carts done their real test drives in Houston. In contrast to these, the REV-1 can operate on a sidewalk, bike path, or car lane depending on conditions, all of which are permitted by law.
Jacob Culberson, the Austin Transportation Department’s manager of mobility services, told the Chronicle last month that he thought state law was “a very reasonable set” of ground rules; ATD monitors the data to determine if additional rules are needed to protect security, as the law allows. In general, ATD wants to help such applications as the REV-1 to be successful: “I think this is a small step in the right direction,” says Culberson – one of many that the city has to do in order to achieve the ambitious mode – Shifting the goals of his Austin strategic mobility plan.
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