Vayu Robotics has today unveiled its first delivery robot. The One can follow staff around stores to load up customer orders, before autonomously navigating city streets at speeds up to 20 mph to deliver the goods. Commercial deployment has begun.
We've seen a bunch of delivery robots trundle around campuses and neighborhoods over the years, with companies like Amazon, Fed-Ex, Walmart, Uber Eats and others all trying out different solutions. A Californian startup is rolling down a somewhat different path, with an autonomous bot that uses a new low-cost vision system plus AI training to navigate without pre-mapping the route, and does away with pricey sensor suites to boot.
Vayu Robotics was founded in 2021 by "engineers, technologists and business leaders with decades of industry experience developing and commercializing cutting-edge automotive sensing, autonomous vehicles and robotics technology."
The team launched a newly developed camera sensor in 2022, aimed at allowing its autonomous delivery bots to roll without LiDAR sensors. Vayu Sense "combines dense, low-cost CMOS image sensors with modern computational imaging and machine learning techniques." The company claims that this proprietary technology not only outperforms typical RGB cameras but LiDAR too, resulting in a cost-effective high-resolution robotic vision system with high-res depth perception, object detection and the ability to work effectively in challenging conditions.
This was followed by a proprietary foundation AI model for robotics autonomy called the Vayu Drive that's trained using both simulated and real-world data, and negates the need for HD maps, localization technology or LiDAR – relying on the Sense vision system instead.
"It is an end-to-end neural network, similar to LLMs in that it operates on a tokens in and tokens out basis," explained the company. "The input is multimodal – image tokens from the cameras, instruction tokens for the instruction that the robot has been told to perform, route tokens to show it the road-level navigation path.
"Differently from other LLMs, it has a notion of 'state' that is built-up over time and is updated with every additional input frame that is received. This allows for large context windows without the typical slow-down that happens with large contexts. It is designed to run efficiently on the edge at 10 frames per second."
Vayu Robotics emerged from stealth in October last year with US$12.7 million in seed funding from backers including Lockheed Martin, and has now announced the launch of its first delivery robot. The One is designed to roll on roads as well as bike lanes, sidewalks and inside stores, which – when combined with the use of AI foundation models and low-cost passive sensors – is claimed to be a world first.
The four-wheeled electric delivery pod stands 3.3 ft tall (1 m), is 5.9 ft (1.8 m) in length and measures 2.2 ft (0.67 m) in width – so it shouldn't present too much of an obstacle to other traffic as it heads to customers at up to 20 mph (32 km/h). The maximum per-charge range of its battery pack is reported to be between 60 and 70 miles (up to 112.6 km).
Once it arrives at its drop-off point, it can mount the sidewalk or driveway, come to a stop, open its side door and remove the allotted package with its robot arm. It can stow up to 100 lb (45 kg) of goods inside its storage compartment, though with some tweaking that could increase to 200 lb, says the company.
The One is currently being tested by an as-yet-unnamed "large e-commerce player" that plans to deploy 2,500 robots, starting in San Ramon, California, ahead of expansion to other cities in the US. Other commercial customers are expected to join the program, but Vayu is also looking to have its technologies used in other robot applications – and is currently working with a "leading global robotics manufacturer" to swap out LiDAR sensors for Vayu sensing tech.
"Our software is robot form factor agnostic and we have already deployed it across several wheeled form factors. In the near future, Vayu's software technology will enable the movement of quadrupedal and bipedal robots, allowing us to expand into those markets as well," revealed company co-founder, Anand Gopalan. The video below has more.
Source: Vayu Robotics
If they're going to put in electric refrigeration units, it will make the little vehicles even more valuable.
I hope the thing has documenting cameras out the wazoo and a major 'HELP' siren.