Delivery Robots May See Competition from Robotaxis

• Nuro AI receives permission from the California DMV to expand testing of its Level 4 tech to four Bay Area cities.

• The delivery robot startup has been testing its third-generation R3 robot, which features two 27-cubic-foot cargo bays.

• Similarly to robotaxi developer Waymo, Nuro has partnered with Uber Eats for food delivery in a 10-year agreement signed in 2022, previewing a future in which robotaxis and delivery robots alike could deliver take-out.

The delivery robot revolution may take a little while longer to get here, but it's clear that robotaxis aren't the only SAE Level 4 vehicles perpetually on the cusp of going mainstream.

Nuro, developer of delivery robots that use city streets and can mix with traffic, has recently received permission from the California DMV to expand the testing of what is already its third-generation robot to the cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, and Menlo Park, building on several years of smaller-scale testing in the Bay Area.

And it will do so with its latest delivery robot.

Just like its predecessors, the Nuro R3 is a toaster-shaped robot just a bit smaller than a hatchback, designed to deliver goods curbside while letting recipients retrieve them from its cargo compartment, which makes up the bulk of the robot's body. The R3 features two 27-cubic-foot cargo bays, which can transport frozen or heated food, in addition to other items, and can move at speeds up to 45 mph.

After a period of delivery robot optimism early on the pandemic, as well as some setbacks, Nuro and its competitors have worked to fine-tune their models for a world where face-to-face contact is still common and where a business case for delivery robots still matters, while preparing for the next leap in the industry.

Earlier this year Nuro has teamed up with semiconductor design and software firm Arm Holdings to commercialize its delivery robots, and to develop the next generation of its Nuro Driver software.

"Being AI-first means Nuro Driver’s perception and behavior capabilities are learned from data to capture the nuances of the real world and provide a natural driving experience," Arm said earlier this year. "The resulting autonomy system, which leverages the latest cutting edge research in AI technology, is embedded in an engineered system with rules-based checks to provide further safety guarantees."

Nuro now faces potential competition not so much from other delivery robots, but from robotaxis themselves, with Uber Eats having inked a deal with Waymo earlier this year to allow its Level 4 cars to deliver food around Phoenix. This wasn't the case a mere two years ago, when robotaxis and delivery robots were largely seen as being in distinctly different categories.

It's a relatively small-scale rollout in Waymo's case, just in Phoenix for now, but it demonstrates the potential of yet another Level 4 vehicle even if actual business considerations are somewhat secondary at the moment. After all, one of the main differences between Nuro's R3 delivery robots and robotaxis is that the latter can carry food and passengers.

Nuro has been working with Uber Eats as well, we should note, but the scale of both operations with Uber Eats suggest that human drivers will still be employed nationwide quite a few years from now, even if the food itself could be increasingly prepared by robots.

Every once in a while it's useful to take a step back and look at what delivery robot developers are trying to solve: Automating delivery jobs and avoiding paying a human driver. Billions have now been spent on this "problem," and delivery robots are only making incremental progress as their developers attempt to make business cases to commercial customers for their hardware, software, and operational costs.

Perhaps it's fair to say that we are now inching toward a future where some percentage of delivery jobs can be done by robots, even if the question of why they should be done by robots has gotten somewhat lost over time.

Will delivery robots and robotaxis take over a significant percentage of delivery jobs in the coming years, or will they largely remain a novelty? Let us know in the comments below.