The future of autonomous delivery may be unfolding in suburban Houston
On the muggy streets of suburban Houston, amid McMansions, bright green lawns and stately oak trees, a futuristic race is quietly afoot.
The contestants are not people but late-model Toyota Priuses outfitted with an array of sophisticated sensors. Despite fierce competition and unending pressure to perform, the nearly silent vehicles do not speed. They move cautiously, rigorously following traffic laws and never topping 25 mph.
Their goal is not an easily discerned finish line but to map large swaths of the nation’s fourth-largest metropolis, a sprawling patchwork of neighborhoods, mini-cities, strip malls, gridlocked superhighways and mazelike gated communities — an area so prodigious in size it easily could swallow Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island whole.
The vehicles are owned by Nuro, a Silicon Valley robotics
company with an ambitious goal: to become the world’s preeminent autonomous delivery service, allowing millions of people to have groceries and other goods delivered by robots instead of making trips to the store, potentially reducing traffic and kicking off a new chapter in our relationship with machines. For months now, Nuro’s robotically piloted vehicles have been successfully, if quietly, delivering groceries to restaurants and homes around Houston, the vehicles’ sensors mapping the city as they go.
The faster Nuro’s vehicles map Houston’s notoriously chaotic roadways, the faster the company can refine its software and export its business model elsewhere. But time is in short supply.
Like Nuro, companies such as Amazon, Alphabet-owned Waymo, Robomart, General Motors’ Cruise division, Fordaffiliated Argo AI, Starship Technologies and many others are also rushing to deploy high-functioning autonomous vehicles for delivery and passenger transport, with some companies attracting major deals and billions of dollars in funding. Their goal is to earn public trust and offer real-life convenience, experts said, heightening their chances of securing a valuable foothold in a new era defined by autonomous transportation.
Safety first
To get there, they will first have to run their autonomous vehicles, or
AVs, through millions of miles of driving tests in cities such as Houston until they are glitch-free and unquestionably safe.
“The pressure is real,” said David Syverud, head of robot operations at Nuro. “And to be clear, it is a race in the AV space to deploy quickly and be the first to really get there.”
As with any race, more speed engenders greater risk, particularly in Houston, a car-dependent city dominated by construction, impatient drivers and the kind of busy roadways that present a serious challenge to experienced human drivers, much less robotic ones.
Each year, more than 600 people die on Houston-area roads, making the city one of the nation’s deadliest major metro areas for drivers, according to a comprehensive analysis of regional traffic fatalities, using 16 years of federal data, that was recently published by the Houston Chronicle.
Regardless of the risks, AV enthusiasts like Syverud are confident that there will come a day in the not-so-distant future when — almost no matter where your family resides — your groceries will be delivered to your home via an autonomous robot.
But to make that vision a reality, companies like Nuro have to build it from scratch, a herculean effort involving dozens of vehicle operators and hundreds of engineers working in synchronicity each day to test robotic systems and map entire cities.
Entry to Houston
After completing a successful pilot in the Phoenix area, Nuro, which has raised more than $1 billion in funding, arrived in Houston last year and launched autonomous deliveries for Kroger, the nation’s largest operator of traditional supermarkets, in April and Domino’s Pizza in June.
Company officials say they were drawn to Houston for the complexity of its metropolitan environment, a puzzle of independent communities, each with its own road conditions, zoning ordinances, parking rules and traffic laws. Some area neighborhoods offer wide lanes and little traffic, others are narrow and perpetually hectic — providing the company’s robotic software a massive variety of testing conditions.
As the country’s most
ethnically diverse large city — and with a foreignborn population of 1.4 million — Houston also is a place where Nuro officials could probe fundamental questions about its business model.
“The big question for us is: Who is going to use this service, and how often will they do it?” said Sola Lawal, a Nuro product operations manager based in Houston who formerly worked for Uber. “Our robots don’t care who they’re delivering to, but we want to understand how different demographics interact with and feel about the robots. Houston allows for this broad swath of experience in one city.”
Using the maps created by its current vehicles, Nuro plans to launch in the coming months a new version of its fully autonomous, passenger-less vehicle known as the R2. The company claims that a smaller delivery vehicle, such as the cooler-size delivery robots employed by Amazon or Starship Technologies, would be unable to travel at the speeds and distances necessary to make autonomous grocery delivery efficient in Houston.
When a robotically driven vehicle pulls up to a home with groceries, two Nuro employees — known as vehicle operators — are always inside. (That is likely to change when Nuro launches its fully autonomous R2 vehicle in Houston later this year.)
Each day in Houston, all 65 of Nuro’s vehicle operators, working in teams that consist of a driver and a co-driver, are tasked with preparing Nuro’s fleet for the road. Already, the company says, drivers are making dozens of deliveries a day, many of them, somewhat surprisingly, to businesses in Houston’s bustling restaurant scene.
Like driving instructors overseeing an artificially intelligent teenager behind the wheel, operators — who remain ready to wrest control of the car from the robot if something goes wrong — monitor and document turns, braking and acceleration as the vehicles, outfitted with dozens of navigational sensors, quietly roll from one street to the next, creating a hyper-detailed map of the city.
To prepare vehicle operators to endure the tedium of the roadway, Syverud said he reminds his employees that they are part of a larger mission, using a message that Chris Urmson — one of the architects of Google’s self-driving-car program — used to tell his staff: About 40,000 people die on the roads every year, which is roughly the equivalent of four Boeing 737 Maxes falling out of the sky every week.
Nuro’s staffers, Syverud said, have an opportunity to lower those numbers by keeping people off the roads.