Uber Eats To Test Food Delivery With Robots
Uber Eats To Test Food Delivery With uber eat Robots
The newest company to try using robots to bring food to people’s homes is Uber.
This month, the company will roll out two test programs to deliver Uber Eats services by uber eat robots in greater Los Angeles, with robots including four-wheeled robots that roll on sidewalks for short trips as well as self-driving cars for longer trips. The company has long argued that automation is essential to its future profitability.
Customers of Uber Eats will have the opportunity to choose a robot delivery option starting on Monday in place of a conventional human delivery. Customers will find instructions on how to retrieve their food from the robot inside the Uber app. The Serve robot has a lid that opens to show a delivery inside and is shaped like a vibrant cooler on wheels. The uber eat robots will operate in West Hollywood, and it has headlights that resemble eyes, giving it a cartoonish appearance.
In Santa Monica, California, self-driving Hyundai vehicles from the startup Motional will handle larger orders. The alliance was initially declared in December. One of the autonomous driving industries’ most established teams is Motional. Previously known as nuTonomy, the business debuted a small robotaxi service in Singapore in 2016 and started testing driverless cars with Lyft in Las Vegas in 2018. Hyundai and the automotive technology supplier Aptiv jointly own Motional. In Las Vegas, it intends to start a robotaxi service alongside Lyft the next year.
Orders delivered by Hyundai sedan will be kept in a thermal container in the back seat until the customer is ready to pick them up. As a safety measure, Motional will have a human test driver behind the wheel. Deliveries will be supervised by a remote human operator through Serve Robotics, the company that runs Uber’s sidewalk robots.
Uber’s head of autonomous mobility and delivery, Noah Zych, predicts that in the near future, robot deliveries will make up “a very, very small percentage of our deliveries.”
In the long run, deliveries might become more economical thanks to robots. According to him, autonomous deliveries might make trips that might not be desirable to pay for today—like picking up one’s dry cleaning—affordable in the future. (Uber previously built autonomous vehicles internally, but in 2020 it sold that division to Aurora. Uber continues to invest in Aurora, and the two businesses are collaborating on robotaxis.)
According to Zych, this is the first instance of an autonomous car performing deliveries for Uber. We recognize the possibilities for the future, but we must begin where we are right now.
In recent years, food delivery has been crucial to Uber’s financial performance. In the first three months of the year, its $2.5 billion revenue from deliveries was equal to that of its regular rides operation.
Uber’s adjusted EBITDA, a measure of profitability, shows that food delivery is less profitable than ridehailing, which may imply that this uber eat robots could increase Uber’s profitability. Task automation is often popular among businesses since it lowers labor expenses and increases profit margins.
Companies have long discussed deploying robots to transport goods to customers, but until yet, trial programs have been tiny and typical of the autonomous delivery industry, which has historically been more hype than reality due to technical and regulatory difficulties. In recent years, businesses including Domino’s, Kroger, and Amazon have all experimented with robot delivery.
In a 60 Minutes segment from 2013, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, predicted that drone deliveries would become a reality in four to five years. Although Prime Air made its first delivery public in 2016, it has not yet launched a regular delivery service. Amazon continues to claim that it hopes to provide customers with 30-minute drone deliveries.
Scout is the name of Amazon’s own sidewalk robot delivery service. Amazon claims to have delivered tens of thousands of parcels in Snohomish County, Washington; Irvine, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Franklin, Tennessee since the start of public tests in 2019.
They make up a very small portion of Amazon’s annual deliveries, which comprise billions of shipments.
According to Starship, a sidewalk robot firm, 10,000 deliveries are made every day in 40 sites across the world, including 25 college campuses in the US. Its $1.99 average-priced delivery increased in 2021, according to firm spokesman Janel Steinberg, speaking to CNN Business.
Starship did not specify which regions it claimed to be lucrative in. In order to verify the claim, CNN Business has not reviewed its financial records.
According to George Mason University, where Starship has been operating since 2019, roughly 60 robots make 700–1,000 deliveries daily from places including Panera Bread, Starbucks, and Blaze Pizza.
Deliveries cost $2.49 plus a 10% service charge, according to Sofya Vetrova, a university official. According to Vetrova, 95% of the community’s responses have been favorable.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is one of the biggest players in robot delivery. The first three months of this year saw 53,000 commercial deliveries made by Alphabet’s Wing drone delivery service, a 355 percent increase from the same period in 2021. In addition to Christiansburg, Virginia; Logan, Australia; Canberra, Australia; Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; and Helsinki, Finland, Wing operates.
Wing opted not to comment on its profitability. In the first three months of this year, Other Bets, a division of Alphabet’s financial reports that includes Wing, reported a $1.16 billion loss.
According to Wing spokesperson Scott Coriell, the regulatory framework in Australia has allowed for more size and influence for the company’s technology than it has in the US due to restrictions. The business, like many others, declined to comment on the anticipated date that robot deliveries will become commonplace in the US.
Dave Ferguson, co-founder of the autonomous robot business Nuro, which is testing deliveries with Kroger and 7-Eleven, said, “It’s the trillion-dollar question.
