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If you're a student at UC Berkeley, the tiny Kiwi rolling robots have probably made their appearance, trailing with a burrito inside to be delivered to a dormitory or a building. Now students from 12 other campuses will be able to join this great future of lazy robotic delivery as Kiwi introduces them to a smart student-driven model.
Kiwi's Felipe Chavez and Sasha Iatsenia recently spoke at the TechCrunch Robotics + AI session at the Berkeley campus.
If you do not know the Kiwi model, here's what happens: when you place an order online at a participating restaurant, you have the option to have it delivered via Kiwi. If you wish, one of the company's robots, with lockable and lockable storage compartments, will switch between slots. Your order is placed inside and it arrives at your door (or as close as reasonably possible). ). You can even watch the last live clip from the robot's point of view, as it unfolds for you.
Robots are what Kiwis call "semi-autonomous". This means that if they can navigate most sidewalks and avoid pedestrians, they are monitored by a human and set benchmarks to follow on average every five seconds. Iatsenia said that they had tried to become completely autonomous and that it worked … most of the time. But more is not good enough for a commercial service, so they have humans in the loop. They are working to improve their autonomy, but for now, that's how it is.
The fact that the robots are controlled in one way or another by a Colombian team (whose co-founders are from) considerably removes the futurism of this company, but on reflection, it is a sort of natural evolution of the delivery infrastructure. After all, someone must lead the car it also brings you your food. And in reality, most AIs are exploited or informed directly or indirectly by real people.
The fact that these drivers use multiple vehicles at a time in South America is a technological breakthrough compared to your average delivery vehicle – although it must be said that there is a gloomy air of delocalized labor that saves money on wages. That said, few people shed tears over the salaries of Chinese assemblers who assemble our smartphones and laptops, or waste pickers that separate your poorly sorted recycling system. The global labor economy is complex and the company creates jobs where it was born, at least in part.
Whatever the method chosen, Kiwi has potential: more than 50,000 deliveries have been made and the model seems to have proven itself. Customers are happy, they receive more stuff than ever after the application is downloaded and there are fewer and fewer incidents where a robot is spilled or, you know, that catches fire. The founders said on the scene that the community had really adopted small vehicles, and that a motorist was overturned or otherwise embarrassed, it is often triggered shortly thereafter by a passerby.
Iatsenia and Chavez believe that the model is ready to expand to other campuses, where a similar effort will have to be deployed – but rather than doing it themselves by gathering millions of people and hiring Staff all over the country, they trust the robotics enthusiast groups of students from other universities to help.
For a small, low-cash start-up like Kiwi, it would be risky to expand too much by taking a major turn and using it to move up a gear. They started out being robotics enthusiasts looking to bring something like this to their campuses. Why can not they help others to do the same?
The team has therefore looked at dozens of universities, adding important factors for robotic delivery: layout, density, trade corridors, demographics, and so on. Finally, they came to the following list:
- University of Northern Illinois
- University of Oklahoma
- Purdue University
- Texas A & M
- Parsons
- Cornell
- Easten State University of Tennessee
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Stanford
- Harvard
- NYU
- Rutgers
What they do is reach out to the robotics clubs and student groups at these colleges to find out who wants to partially own the kiwi administration. Berkeley students would still be responsible for maintenance and deployment, but student clubs would go through a certification process and then do local work, such as a capsized bot and on-site problems with customers and restaurants.
"We are exploring several options for working with students on the road, including the share of income," said Iatsenia. "It depends on the campus."
So far, they have sent 40 robots to the 12 listed campuses and will deploy their operations as the programs progress. If you are not in the list, do not worry. If this goes as planned by Kiwi, you can expect an upcoming expansion.
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