Grocery-delivering robot
Delivery robot company Nuro won the first US federal safety approval for a purpose-built self-driving vehicle, advancing the young company’s plans to cart groceries around neighbourhoods and marking a milestone for the autonomous vehicle industry.
The approval indicates that federal regulators at the US Department of Transportation believe specially-built robot cars can safely take to the roads without adhering to all the design standards for regular vehicles. Nuro says it plans to soon begin testing in Houston, Texas.
Many of the existing rules are designed to ensure the person at the wheel can remain safely in control. But Nuro’s vehicle, which it calls R2, won’t need mirrors or a windshield. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said in the context of a selfdriving delivery vehicle those features ‘‘no longer make sense.’’
The federal approval also carries strict limits. It’s only good for two years, and Nuro’s lightweight robots won’t carry passengers, won’t travel faster than 40kmh, and production will be capped at 5000 vehicles. But it indicates that federal regulators, who have been grappling with how to allow the autonomous vehicle industry to continue experimenting without sacrificing public safety, have found a path toward the next generation of vehicles.
The Trump administration has adopted a largely hands-off policy, wary of stifling innovation, but has faced criticism from safety advocates and some lawmakers that it’s leaving too much up to industry.
While the full terms of Nuro’s approval were not released Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement that it comes with conditions to ensure safety. The company will have to share information with regulators in real time, hold regular meetings with officials and engage with communities where it wants to deploy the R2.
The slender robot is much smaller than a regular car, and has large doors that swing upward to reveal its cargo compartment.
Houston customers will be able to place an order for delivery from US supermarket chain Kroger or Walmart. A robot will deliver their groceries to a designated spot and the customer will enter a code to unlock the robot to obtain their purchases.
Dave Ferguson, one of Nuro’s founders, wrote in a blog post that the R2 is designed to protect pedestrians and programmed to drive courteously, so it’s positioned to become a trustworthy and ‘‘socially responsible’’ user of neighbourhood roads. Ferguson wrote that the government, ‘‘has shown that safety and innovation can advance together, and that they will act to address regulations that stand in the way.’’
Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, who both previously worked at Google’s self-driving car company, founded Nuro in 2016. The company began testing a previous version of its vehicle 2018, doing grocery deliveries for Kroger. The company says the exemptions from the existing standards have allowed it to design a vehicle that is safer, describing a front panel designed to cause less harm to a pedestrian than a windshield would in a crash.