Uber Eats launches robot deliveries in Japan: Do they exist in the US?
Self-driving robots will soon be traversing sidewalks in Japan delivering food for Uber Eats, its first international market after launching in the US.
Uber Eats announced a new partnership to bring self-driving robots to Japan to make food delivers. The California-based food delivery platform already teamed up with Cartken to deliver food to customers using the autonomous robotics startup’s sidewalk self-driving bots in Miami in 2022. Mitsubishi Electric, which will supervise operations, will join them to rollout the service in a select part of Tokyo by the end of March.
Shoji Tanaka, the senior general manager of the Advanced Application Development Center, Development Division at Mitsubishi Electric said that robot delivery is “an effective countermeasure to the logistics crisis that will become more serious in the future.” Japan is grappling with an aging population and shrinking workforce and robots are seen as a potential solution. “We hope that this newly announced initiative will serve as a catalyst for the spread of robot delivery services in Japan,” Tanaka added.
Uber Eats launches robot deliveries in Japan: Do they exist in the US?
Uber Eats, as well as other food delivery platforms, have been testing autonomous delivery systems around the United States in cities and on campuses. In May 2022, prior to teaming up with Cartken, Uber Technologies partnered with Serve Robotics and Motional to run two pilot programs in Los Angeles. The following year an expansion of the program was announced with the former to include as many as 2,000 AI-powered sidewalk delivery robots in unspecified new markets on the Uber platform.
The pilot with Motional involves IONIQ 5 autonomous vehicles traveling on streets rather than sidewalks. In September 2022, Uber signed a ten-year deal with autonomous driving startup Nuro to test run driverless delivery pods on the streets of Silicon Valley and Houston, Texas.
The first partnership with Cartken was signed in December 2022 to operate in select parts of Miami. In April the following year the partnership expanded to Fairfax, Virginia.
Cartken’s Model C, an autonomous sidewalk robot, is the size of a small cooler which can fit three grocery bags. It travels at 3.3 miles per hour according to TechCrunch, about the pace of a pedestrian. The bots are loaded with sensors like cameras and advanced software that helps it navigate sidewalks and crosswalks detecting humans, pets and objects.