Segway Develops Delivery Robot With Startup Coco
Segway sees a future in sidewalk delivery robots and is preparing to become a manufacturer in a fast-growing industry.
The company, which has supplied electric scooters to almost all major shared micromobility operators, is working with Los Angeles delivery robot startup Coco to build 1,000 partially automated, remotely operated delivery robots. Coco will begin deploying the robots in Los Angeles and two other US cities in the first quarter of 2022.
The new batch of Coco 1 robots, as the company brands them, will add to its existing fleet of 100 Coco 0 "box on wheels" units, which the company built to prove its business model. According to Coco's Senior Vice President of Vehicles, Sahil Sharma, the company has also placed an order for an additional 1,200 devices, which are expected to be deployable by May or June 2022 pending potential contracts.
Segway has conducted robotics research and development for many years and even formed a dedicated division in 2016. That same year, the company introduced its Loomo robot, which is essentially a scooter base with a small robotic head that includes an Intel RealSense RGB-D camera, speech recognition and self-driving capabilities.
Loomo was more of an experiment than a business opportunity. The partnership with Coco is the first time the company is deploying its "robotic mobility platforms" at scale for delivery. Segway's Vice President of Global Business Development, Tony Ho, said it also signals a longer-term shift in the robotic delivery sector.
“This is only the beginning of our partnership. We will stay in the product business, and Coco will be the operator. So it's somewhat like the micromobility space, where we provide the vehicles and equipment, and they handle the relationship with the city, the staff and the entire operation behind it. Right now we are seeing this almost the same way it was with scooters in 2017, when the whole industry was booming”
According to him, Segway's business in electric scooters and e-bikes is thriving. He noted that this will provide leverage for large-scale robotics growth through shared knowledge of vehicles and supply chain resources.
“Coco is a very young company, so they were smart enough to focus on what they do best and hand off supply chain scaling to Segway. We take this very seriously, and our company's strategy is to support the winners in rapid expansion”
The global market for autonomous delivery robots is expected to reach $236.59 million by 2027, and a number of players have recently emerged trying to control a slice of this pie.
Starship Technologies, a sidewalk competitor, has raised a total of $102 million in funding, Kiwibot recently expanded its operations across university campuses, and Nuro, which operates on roads, recently raised $600 million and announced a partnership with 7-Eleven. In August, Coco raised $36 million in funding, bringing its total funding to $43 million.
Segway expects sidewalk robots to be the most effective method of "first and last mile" delivery, especially in densely populated urban areas during rush hour.
“From a product standpoint, a simpler design delivers more reliable operation, fewer breakdowns and lower upfront capital costs. The labor shortage caused by the pandemic has only accelerated the spread of robots. In addition, slower devices with smaller payloads are convenient for pedestrians on sidewalks and are welcomed in cities”
Most robotic delivery startups are not yet truly autonomous, and Coco is no exception. Its devices, equipped with cameras, GPS and some computing power, are remotely controlled but have some basic automated driving functions. For example, they can move in a straight line and stop if an obstacle appears, which allows a single "pilot" to oversee more than one delivery at a time and take over in complex sections such as crosswalks.
“We take a very business-oriented approach to this. Many people talk about L4 and L5, 90% autonomy. We really want to understand how many pilots we need to complete a given delivery volume in this area. We built it from scratch, thinking about what makes sense for our business and how we should build technology to support it, rather than asking, "How can we simplify a self-driving car?" Our pilots play a central role in our operations and always will, so let's build the product around them to make them as effective as possible”
Coco's system takes data collected on its various routes and uses that information to train machine learning algorithms in its self-driving software. But the real advantage of a large fleet is the ability to map more community areas and find faster, simpler routes for the robot.
“From the fleet, we can learn which segments are most efficient, because we care about every second of delivery, so we try to map the city to create the most efficient routes, taking into account connectivity, sidewalk infrastructure, pedestrian traffic and vehicle traffic. We learn a lot from the whole fleet. It's not only about autonomy. We collect all this information to move through the city as efficiently as possible”
