Robots carry dinners to S.F. neighborhoods
A robot slightly smaller than a shopping cart rolled down a Potrero Hill sidewalk, halting at a stop sign before crossing the street. It came to another corner with a traffic light, and waited for it to turn green before proceeding along the crosswalk.
The robot and others like it are now delivering dinners to people in San Francisco’s Mission and Potrero Hill neighborhoods, courtesy of a partnership between startup Marble and Yelp’s Eat24 food-delivery service, to test a handful of delivery robots as meal couriers.
For all the hoopla about selfdriving cars and delivery drones, many experts think that small, land-based electric robots may end up being the first solution to the “last-mile” problem of getting goods from restaurants, stores and warehouses to homes.
That was the impetus for Marble, a 2-year-old San Francisco company whose three founders met at Carnegie Mellon University where they worked on driverless vehicles, autonomous space robots and lunar landers for various competitions.
“Self-driving cars are awesome, but they’re still many years out,” said Marble CEO and co-founder Matt Delaney. “With (delivery robots) we can get into the world
sooner and provide a big, meaningful service, here and now.”
Marble’s robots employ technology similar to selfdriving cars: cameras, lidar (a laser form of radar), ultrasonic sensors, high-definition 3-D maps and artificial intelligence. Marble uses mobility scooters for the wheel base, since the wheelchair-like scooters already are the right size to navigate sidewalks and doorways. Chugging along at a walking speed of 3 or 4 mph, they are designed to be “reliable and courteous citizens of the sidewalk,” Delaney said.
Yelp Eat24, which lets users order food online from restaurants nationwide, said it’s working with Marble largely to keep those eateries abreast of trends. Most of its restaurants handle deliveries themselves, while some rely on Eat24 to connect them with a delivery service. Restaurants decide whether to subsidize delivery costs or tack on a charge.
“We want to help our 40,000 restaurant partners understand the technologies and really cool gadgets they should look out for,” said Shalin Sheth, director of delivery operations for Yelp Eat24. “These are early tests. Robots becoming part of a delivery fleet in a major capacity is probably a long way off, but adding them as another piece of the smorgasbord of delivery choices will help expand the number of people you can reach.”
Initially, four restaurants (Dosa, Truly Mediterranean, Aslam’s Rasoi and Alhamra) will offer robot deliveries, but the list will expand. The robots “work” from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Customers will receive a text asking if they agree to have a robot courier and can meet it outside their address. If they decline, a human will come instead. A text will give a code to unlock the robot’s storage compartments.
Marble, which has $4 million in initial backing, has several competitors.
Estonia’s Starship Technologies, founded by two of the people behind Skype, is testing its R2-D2-like robots with San Francisco’s DoorDash in Redwood City and Washington, D.C.
“The response has been incredibly positive,” said DoorDash spokesman Eitan Bencuya. “People are delighted, intrigued and want to learn more. Kids come out and try to pet them like a dog.”
Like Sheth, he sees robots as complementing human couriers on foot, bikes, scooters and in cars. DoorDash is also helping its San Francisco couriers rent electric bikes at discounted rates.
Starship robots will deliver Domino’s Pizza in Europe by summer. South San Francisco startup Dispatch is testing a delivery robot named Carry on the campuses of Menlo College and California State University Monterey Bay.
Although the robots operate autonomously, Marble and Starship both send humans along with them to interact with the public. Both see a future in which someone in a command center could monitor multiple robots as they make deliveries without a human chaperone.
Redwood City and Washington both passed regulations allowing sidewalk robots before Starship began its tests with DoorDash. Marble’s Delaney said the company “is in active discussions with San Francisco about permits,” but declined to be more specific.
Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works, said Marble has not contacted her department, which regulates city sidewalks.
“We will closely monitor (the Marble test) to make sure they don’t block access or create hazards,” she said. “The transportation code regulates bikes and skateboards, but there’s nothing about robots. Agencies are talking together about it now.”
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at University of South Carolina and Stanford who studies autonomous vehicles, said he thinks ground robots could eventually be big, even if they are more of a public relations gimmick at first.
“The question will be: Is it cheaper for delivery to happen by person, by robot, or some combination?” he said. Right now, with many companies using independent contractors for delivery, “humans are really cheap, because so many costs are externalized, either borne by the workers or by society paying for their health care.” He sees that cheapness as artificial, and said that at some point, robots will be more cost-effective in some situations.
The folks at Marble, of course, see robots as the future.
“Two years ago, robots that could do this task in cities was a foreign, crazy concept,” Delaney said. “Now it’s a foregone conclusion.”