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Refraction AI’s 4.5-foot, 150-pound Rev-1 three-wheeled robotic vehicle delivers pizzas in Austin, Texas. The company believes that the future of autonomous driving is “zero occupants”.
Source: Refraction AI
When companies like Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk come to Austin, Texas, the booming city and new technology hub has grown so much that it has struggled to keep it strange.
But since the beginning of June, when residents of the South Congress, Downtown or Travis Heights neighborhoods order pizza from Southside Flying Pizza, their cakes could arrive in a three-wheeled robot – the REV-1. But it’s not a fully self-driving Tesla.
About two dozen REV-1 vehicles are now rolling down the streets of Austin and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the company behind the robots – Refraction AI – first launched in 2019 to take advantage of driverless technology in new ways.
Autonomous vehicles and their potential to change the way people get around has been on the horizon for years. But the technology hasn’t matured as dramatically as early investors hoped. Tesla says autonomous driving is in full swing and is launching its latest beta test on July 10, but the company has missed many self-imposed deadlines and Musk recently admitted that fully self-driving is harder than he predicted. Meanwhile, both Uber and Lyft have sold their self-driving vehicle research divisions in recent months.
For startups like Refraction AI, however, the goal is to accelerate the arrival of a driverless future by starting small, with more humble systems that focus on moving packages rather than people.
“We believe this is the future of autonomy,” said Luke Schneider, CEO of Refraction AI.
A 150 pound challenge for Alphabet, Waymo
While the electric REV-1 could technically be called a driverless vehicle, it’s a whole different beast from the LiDAR-equipped multi-ton vans, the ones from Alphabet-backed Waymo, General Motors-backed Cruise, and other multi-billion dollar vans -Companies are developed. Musk has attacked LiDAR in the past, calling it a “crutch”, although recent reports suggest the company recently used the technology for reasons that are still unclear.
The REV-1 “trikes” are 4.5 feet tall and weigh 150 pounds, which makes their profile more like bicycle couriers than delivery vans. And they behave like cyclists too. After a restaurant worker places the “payload” in the storage compartment of a REV-1 (which can hold around six shopping bags), the robot uses a series of sensors to navigate to the curb or, if available, a bike path. It then drives to its destination at a maximum of 24 kilometers per hour, where the customer greets them at the curb and unlocks their meal or package with a unique code.
If the vehicle gets into trouble along the way, which can include unusual obstacles like a crooked couch or common but difficult to automate movements like turning left over traffic or navigating zebra crossings, a dozen “pilots” stand in the distance and temporarily ready Take control of the REV-1.
This will cost a lot more money and a lot more time than we thought. It won’t be a toggle switch overnight.
Luke Schneider, CEO of Refraction AI
In Schneider’s eyes, these awards give the REV-1 a decisive advantage in the delivery business. The small, slow carts can’t do much damage in the event of a breakdown. You don’t drive on the street. And outsourcing the toughest drives to the pilots means the company is ready to deliver food today. Spending years and billions of dollars developing a fully autonomous £ 4,000 vehicle and then using it to deliver pizzas to cutters is an exaggeration is excessive. “I call it bringing a ballistic missile into a knife fight,” he says.
So far, the company appears to be making progress in solving this facet of the overall autonomous driving challenge. They recently reconfigured the REV-1’s sensors to give it night vision so it would work during the most popular time for food delivery. Schneider says the REV-1 fleet carried seven times more meals earlier this year than last year and has made more deliveries every month since March. The 50-employee company recently raised $ 4.2 million in seed capital for a total of $ 8 million in funding.
Dominos, FedEx and “zero inmate” Nuro
Refraction AI isn’t the only self-driving start-up that thinks small.
Nuro, a Californian company that has raised approximately $ 1.5 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase, has developed a golf cart-sized delivery vehicle called the R2 that can travel at speeds of 25 mph. In April, the R2 began shipping pizzas for Domino’s Pizza in Houston, Texas. Last week, the company announced that its next-generation vehicle would deliver packages in a partnership with FedEx.
Domino’s is testing Nuro, an autonomous pizza delivery car in Houston.
Source: Dominos
Nuro was founded by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, two former Alphabet engineers whose self-driving company became Waymo. They were motivated by an assumption similar to that used in refraction AI: removing people completely from the equation would enable the first application of driverless vehicles with fewer stakes.
“We have set ourselves the goal of building a new class of vehicle that is designed exclusively for the transport of things,” wrote Ferguson in a Medium article in 2020. “A vehicle without passengers.”
A Chinese startup, Unity Drive Innovation, took a similar approach to distributing vegetables and food boxes during the pandemic.
Full of self-driving dream, economic reality
Even when mini delivery vans begin to venture on residential streets and bike paths, self-driving giants persistently pursue the full potential of the technology: vehicles that can transport anything and everything anywhere without a driver.
Alphabet’s Waymo launched a semi-autonomous beta test of its Waymo One ride-sharing service in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2018. Last October, the service was made available to the public and at the same time completely autonomous, with no drivers and no remote control pilots – although it uses a “fleet response team”, specialists who feed the cars with information when the machines encounter an ambiguous situation such as roadworks or road closures cannot interpret.
Waymo has also worked with UPS in Phoenix to move packages between UPS branches and a local shipping center. And two weeks ago it announced a partnership with the freight forwarder JB Hunt to move freight autonomously over a route in Texas, initially under human supervision.
The company’s leadership remains confident of what Julianne McGoldrick, a spokeswoman for Waymo, describes as the flywheel effect. Once you’ve developed a vehicle that can navigate the roads as well as a human can, you can use it for a variety of applications that are mutually reinforcing.
“We have seen that all the progress we make in ride hailing and with cars flows directly into the trucking and local delivery areas, and then the progress we make there flows back into ride hailing “Says McGoldrick.
Waymo, Nuro and Refraction AI prove that machines can navigate the world well enough to carry people and pizzas in small quantities.
But the billion-dollar question remains: will either model prove profitable enough to mainstream self-driving vehicles and potentially reduce the world’s CO2 emissions and car accidents?
Ashley Nunes, a transportation research fellow at Harvard Law School, says driverless vehicles could complement current driving and delivery services in places like densely populated urban areas with mild weather. But he suspects the tough economy of competition in personal vehicle ownership will call into question the truly transformative benefits. He points out that all self-propelled fleets require oversight, be it in the form of remote pilots or a fleet response team, and that the price of that human labor limits the affordability of the vehicles.
“‘Autonomous’ or ‘driverless’ doesn’t mean ‘without people’,” he says.
But that won’t stop companies like Nuro and Refraction AI from moving closer to a future of driverless vehicles, one pizza at a time.
“It will cost a lot more money and a lot more time than we thought,” says Schneider. “It won’t be a toggle switch overnight.”
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