‘Contactless’ shipping paving way for FedEx bot
“It’s designed to deliver pizza, auto parts, things you order in small quantities you want now.” Gloria Boyland FedEx executive
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – FedEx is fulfilling many home deliveries without customer contact amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which the head of its delivery robot’s development sees as another sign of the project’s value.
“COVID-19 brought the term ‘contactless,’” said Rebecca Yeung, vice president of advanced technology and innovation at FedEx, during a virtual panel at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on Tuesday. “Before that, not many people were talking about contactless (delivery). Now, it’s almost the preferred way of us delivering.”
FedEx has implemented no-contact pickups and deliveries during the pandemic, which includes a suspension of signature requirements for most FedEx Express and Ground deliveries in the U.S. Roxo, FedEx’s under-development autonomous delivery robot, would remove point-of-delivery contact out of the equation entirely for qualified shipments.
Both consumers and governments have had an “open-mindedness” about autonomous delivery since contactless shipments began, Yeung said. COVID-19 led to a spike in home deliveries as the pandemic pushed retail traffic from physical stores to websites, accelerating the e-commerce growth FedEx expected in three to five years to occur in three to five months.
Roxo isn’t suited for “high density” delivery routes involving several stops and a truckload of packages, Yeung explained. The robot instead will tackle the challenge of same day, on-demand delivery, as having a delivery truck ferry a single box is the type of inefficient delivery FedEx wants to avoid.
“For us, the FedEx SameDay bot will solve a niche offering that today is not what we offer,” Yeung said during the panel discussing the use of autonomous robots for delivery.
Roxo in development as e-commerce booms
A commercial release date for the bot has not been announced. In 2019, it underwent tests in downtown Memphis and East Memphis to see how well it could safely navigate its route and comply with regulations. It also was tested in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Texas cities of Plano and Frisco.
FedEx executive Gloria Boyland said during the testing in Memphis that Roxo can fulfill same-day, point-to-point deliveries of small payloads the company doesn’t address in its core business.
“It’s designed to deliver pizza, auto parts, things you order in small quantities you want now,” Boyland said then.
The bot’s base is the same as the iBot, the stairclimbing wheelchair invented by DEKA founder Dean
Kamen. Yeung said this base allows it to travel various terrain, helping it tackle what she called the most challenging part of a delivery: the last 15 feet to the customer.
FedEx is preparing Roxo for a second round of testing as it advances legislation and regulatory approvals for it, Chairman and CEO Fred Smith has said.
Yeung: Roxo will create jobs, not ‘totally replace’ them
Matthew Johnson-Roberson, co-founder of Refraction AI, said on the panel that autonomous technology will replace jobs, so companies involved in the space need to find the best approach for addressing that job loss.
“I think that a lot of these industries have a long history with not thinking through what the human consequences of that will be,” he said of automation. “… I’m an advocate for saying, ‘Let’s figure out the right way of doing this.’ Because if we solve this problem, we’re going to do all our deliveries with robots, because it should be faster, it should be cheaper and more efficient.”
Yeung said certain segments of the transportation industry can’t be replaced with robots, and Roxo will address only deliveries that aren’t cost efficient for a FedEx delivery driver. She added that new technology-focused jobs will be needed to manage deliveries with Roxo. “It won’t totally replace jobs,” she said. “It will just create different types of jobs.”
Roxo is not the only tech-forward initiative FedEx is involved in. The company is experimenting with delivery drones, and one of its feeder planes recently flew without a pilot aboard in a Reliable Robotics test.
Although FedEx collaborates on different technology programs with different partners, the programs converge on backend infrastructure, Yeung said. Dynamic routing technology, dispatch systems and tracking interfaces are all areas FedEx sees “great synergy” for its various autonomous applications.
Yeung didn’t provide specific updates on Roxo’s development timeline, but she said the developmental pace of delivery robots has an advantage over autonomous, passenger-bearing vehicles.
The faster speed of autonomous vehicles versus a slower delivery robot “drives a huge amount of complexity, as well as technology, from both a hardware and software perspective,” she said, since there is a need for more sophisticated cameras and sensors.
“It makes (Roxo) a very great use case for realworld applications,” she said.