Bot appetit! Is this little guy the future of food delivery?
Tech startup hopes ‘Geoffrey,’ a robot courier driven remotely by humans, will gain traction
If you’ve been to Toronto’s Corktown or Riverside neighbourhoods recently, you may have found yourself doing a double take at the sight of a pink, knee-high robot trundling down the sidewalk. That’s Geoffrey. When you see Geoffrey whizzing down the street, it’s easy to think it has a mind of its own. “It has a very childlike quality to it,” says Jessica Clausen, who sees a robot go by her workplace a few times a week. “I don’t know if that makes sense, but it was like ‘doop-doo boo-boop,’ ” she says, mimicking the sounds of R2-D2.
But Geoffrey, one of seven of these robots all sharing the same name (after Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian “godfather of artificial intelligence”), isn’t autonomous. They’re all piloted remotely by human drivers with video and GPS feeds connected to their home computers.
So, what’s the deal with the Geoffreys? Have they come to take over?
When it comes to future of contactless delivery, the answer is yes.
In 2019, Ignacio Tartavull was working as a software engineer for Uber’s Toronto-based autonomous car lab. But when an Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, he left, no longer optimistic about the future of self-driving cars. “When you study the history, you see that we’ve been working on this for 30 years … We might be another 20 years away,” he says. “So I started thinking about ways we could use the technology for something that could be a product today.”
The result is Tiny Mile, a robotic-delivery company Tartavull co-founded with fellow Uber alumnus Gellert Mattyus. Tartavull says they began work on their robots in 2019, but with the pandemic’s arrival, “it became … not just about saving people time. It’s also about keeping them safe.”
Originally partnered with Foodora, Tiny Mile struck out on its own in May, when the gig-economy giant abruptly shut down in Canada. Now, its robots are delivering for three downtown restaurants: MexiCados Burritos & Bowls, Animal Liberation Kitchen and Bombay Palace.
When a customer orders delivery via the Ritual app, Geoffrey comes to the restaurant, lifts its lid to receive the food, and carries it to its destination in a locked compartment. Tiny Mile then sends the customer a text letting them know their food has arrived. No human contact. No masks necessary.
The robots’ 12-hour battery life allows for a full day of deliveries on a single charge within their two-kilometre service area. Drivers navigate using a combination of built-in GPS and front- and rear-mounted wide-angle cameras — perfect for zooming in on address numbers.
Customers may want to wipe down the packaging before digging in, though. Tiny Mile staff clean the robots when they come in to charge every night. But like any courier’s shoulder bag, they may be used for consecutive deliveries without cleaning.
As it gets up and running, the startup is focusing on the gig-economy delivery model. Tartavull says he hopes robots can offer a better deal on delivery for restaurants, couriers and customers. But for him, that’s just the beginning. In the long term, he thinks the technology can change the way we run errands entirely.
The robots’ advantage in the food delivery market hinges on drivers’ multitasking ability. “I worked as a delivery courier myself for a few months to learn the business,” says Tartavull. “You spend a lot of time waiting for your next order to come in so you can make money.”
Instead of waiting between orders, the robots’ drivers would simply take control of whichever robot is closest to a restaurant that has a delivery ready to go. By “switching” between robots under their control, Tartavull says drivers stand to make more for their time. “You basically leave the robot waiting and drive a second robot. And that’s how you achieve some efficiencies.”
However, with only three restaurants signed on, five drivers and two robots currently running, the pilot project is too small to test the “switching” model. Instead, Tiny Mile is paying its pilot-project drivers a flat $25 an hour during the test run.
There’s another advantage for couriers that carries more immediate appeal: safety.
Joseph Wirth, a bicycle courier in the downtown core, says biking city streets in winter can get dicey. “It gets slippery out. It gets cold and wet, but I still do deliveries because I need the money. It’d be a lot safer with the robot.”
In the pandemic, that work-from-home feature adds a new layer of protection. According to Tanya Spasic, owner of Riverside’s Animal Liberation Kitchen, Geoffrey has already helped protect her restaurant staff from COVID-19 while still serving their regulars.
“(One of our regulars) said, ‘My roommate is diagnosed positive with COVID so we have to quarantine for two weeks,’ ” says Spasic. “For her, it was perfect to just come outside to pick up from the robot. You know, contactless.”
There’s a financial benefit for Spasic, too. Tiny Mile is offering partnering restaurants a flat rate of $5.99 per delivery, $3 of which the restaurant pays, the other $2.99 paid by the customer. Compared with the 30-per-cent commission on the price of each meal restaurants pay to services such as Uber Eats, on top of any delivery fees for the customer, that offers both parties a significant price advantage on orders more than $10.
Of course, it also puts Tiny Mile at a significant loss per delivery. Not unusual for a startup in the early days. Tartavull says they won’t make a profit for a few years — not until they have the order volume that would see many drivers juggling multiple robots. To that end, they’ve already started expanding.
On Tuesday afternoon, Tiny Mile’s account manager, Omar Elawi, visited more of the neighbourhood’s restaurants with Geoffrey scurrying along beside. Showing off the robot seemed to generate immediate interest — all told, Elawi returned with six more restaurants interested in signing on.
Soon, Tartavull says, Geoffrey will be able to carry more than just takeout. He’s planning an online registration tool so that anyone with a business can sign up to deliver groceries, prescriptions — anything that will fit in the robot’s lock box.
For now, eligibility may be limited by the robots’ speed (about six kilometres per hour) and range — within two kilometres of the business. But with Geoffrey’s charm driving the interest in this technology, Tartavull is optimistic they’ll have 50 robots on the street by next year.
The goal, he says, is for affordable robot delivery to change the way we do errands.