Autonomous last mile delivery occupies a niche category in enterprise tech – one that’s not-quite-robotics but also not-quite-automotive.
But thanks to spikes in ecommerce and an increase in labour shortages, this market has grown from $14 billion in 2021 to $18 billion in 2022 and, according to forecasts, is expected to grow further to $48 billion over the next three years.
And yet, the big guys are pulling out. Last October FedEx closed down its robot delivery programme, Roxo, switching its focus instead, it said, to “more near term possibilities”.
In the same month Amazon announced that it was scaling back on development of its autonomous delivery robot Scout following a three year trial after “failing to meet customer expectations”.
At CES2023, however, I met up with two start-ups which are still intent on putting in the extra mile for last mile delivery.
Ottonomy.IO returned to the Las Vegas event this year, unveiling its new unattended delivery robot, Ottobot Yeti. The latest model is based on feedback from its 14 customers (ranging from airports, retailers and postal services) who were involved in some of its earlier fully autonomous delivery trials using V2 of its Ottobot following its August 2022 release.
Most customer feedback focussed on how parcels needed to be made more accessible to different end customers (wheelchair users, for instance) and they also needed to be able to drop off the packages if the recipient wasn’t there.
Ottobot Yeti, Ottonomy’s latest incarnation, claims to address these needs by including an automated sliding delivery hatch to deliver items without human assistance. This hatch now opens sideways (rather than from the top) so that it’s easy for a variety of recipients to receive packages.
“Over a short period of time we were able to convert feedback from multiple pilots to develop an enhanced model of the Ottobot which will facilitate improved accessibility and efficiency for robotic deliveries,” declared Ritukar Vijay Ottonomy’s CEO and one of the startup’s four co-founders, at a pre-CES Power Session and press conference at the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Gathered media watched a live demo of the delivery bot – which covers a 2–4-mile range – as it deposited a package autonomously, performing a 16-inch drop [considered a safe drop height] from its hatch.
These new functions, Vijay added, were especially critical in retail and ecommerce where there was “an urgent need for the option of a completely unmanned delivery process” and he added that the model also “opened up the door to facilitate ecommerce returns”.
Negotiating heavy crowds at airports also inspired further improvements in manoeuvrability, Vijay explained, with the new version able to move sideways and complete a 360 turn.
Ottonomy’s vehicles have now been trialled in a variety of weathers among its wide range of users – from the Norwegian postal service in Oslo to last mile delivery service Goggo in Madrid. There’s also a partnerships in place with telco firm Verizon with some bricks-and-mortar companies also looking to come on board and test the technology.
All this, Vijay added, meant that the firm was now “in the prime position to fill the gap that companies like Amazon and Fedex were not able to”.
Asked why he thought Amazon and its ilk have ditched their bots, he reasoned that all these firms were cutting back their negative capital business, following a sudden decline in e-commerce demand after the spike which followed Covid .
Also, he added: “These use cases and last mile delivery problems are very tough to solve and if you are just doing them as a side gig it’s very difficult. As the world goes into recession companies are focussing on their strengths.”
Prior to founding Ottonomy – on the cusp of the pandemic in 2020 – Vijay spent 15 years working in robotics and autonomous driving, starting out in defence before moving onto autonomous warehousing and manufacturing.
In 2015 he moved over to self-driving cars, briefly working for Aptiv, a spin-off from Dephi electronics. His LinkedIn lists seven patents filed during this time. However, by 2019 self-driving car programmes began slowing down as OEMs priorities pivoted towards more tangible car trends, such as vehicle electrification.
“So we saw that coming and we thought about how we could use that to leverage the autonomous driving technology we’ve been working on to solve some real problems. That’s why we focussed around the delivery space.”
Would Vijay be tempted if a big e-retailer were to come along and snap the business or its technology up?
“There are pros and cons of that scenario. The pro is that it gives you a quick platform to expand really rapidly – but that can sometimes limit you. So it depends on the proposition as well as money on the table,” he replies.
Nathan Ray – Clevon’s chief business development officer – offers up similar reasons when quizzed about parcel and retail giants withdrawal from the autonomous deliver market.
“It’s a very hard thing to master,” he says, adding that the right applications choices “haven’t always been made”.
He explains: “Some of the companies that have gotten out of the market really focussed on personal delivery bots with very small payloads – one delivery – and had trouble getting the cost down on those bots.”
Estonia-based Clevon’s unmanned semi-autonomous last-mile delivery vehicles aren’t as slick as Ottonomy’s more robot-like bots; in fact, they look more like milk floats, but they take their pride in being bigger, multipurpose and scalable.
“We’ve take a minimalistic approach to our vehicle so it’s very cost effective solution,” adds Ray. “Multi-purpose is our USP,” he adds, as we speak in CES’s start-up / emerging tech section, located at the Venetian.
Indeed, Clevon did not grow from a seed funding round but a real life use case: parent company Cleveron – which makes automated pick up lockers – developed the tech in house for several years before spinning it off to commercialise the technology.
Clevon claims that the vehicle can function as a supermarket delivery robot with temperature-controlled parts, a mail delivery vehicle, or even a high-tech coffee robot or ice cream truck.
“And while we specialise in last mile, we can also do security cameras, remote sensing and carry automated lockers on the back. We’re not a niche player we can do anything where you want to remove labour from your supply chain,” Ray claims.
“The other thing about us is that we work in all-weather environments. We don’t use LIDAR so we can operate in snow, rain fog adverse weather conditions. We learned that in Estonia, where the weather is not often ideal.”
Like Ottonomy, the vehicle is designed for enterprise use today, rather than in five years’ time. As such, can be controlled remotely by a telesupervision operator, who can take over the vehicle’s operations as and when necessary.
Ray adds: “Our goal has never been to solve fully autonomous – that’s the eventual aim but we’re looking to see where we can provide value now, and that involves a humans to some extent.
“Creating a computer that can solve for everything that’s going to happen on the road is still a far way off and is still expensive. So while humans are backbone, we’ve been able to remove 80-90% safely.”
Clevon claims that its vehicles have already clocked up over 12,000 miles on public roads globally and its latest model, the Clevon1 – which comes with real time service area mapping – has become the first robot carrier in Europe to offer autonomous delivery services for international parcel service DPD.
Other customers include DHL Express in Estonia, Colruyt Group in Belgium and IKI stores in Vilnius, Lithuania while in the US Clevon performed its first North American autonomous delivery at the Alliance Texas Mobility Innovation Zone (MIZ) in Fort Worth, where its new US branch is located.
Later a dark thought enters my mind. Fort Worth… wasn’t that one of the locations of the US army’s nuclear power programme? And also, what’s to stop a bad actor hacking an airport vending machine bot for malicious purposes?
Is there inbuilt security in these vehicles that prevent them from being hacked by bad actors and programmed to carry harmful payloads?
I circle back to Vijay for answers. It’s something that the industry is currently working on, he says.
“Hacking a robot? We’re working with the Urban Robotics Foundation – which is made up of robotics companies and a consortia of universities – to come up with an ISO standard for public robots which includes cyber security, accessibility and also how much autonomy machines should be given and what the failsafe options are. There is definitely a need for such a standard. Nothing has been defined yet but, maybe in a year or two the first draft will be out.”
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