{"id":123055,"date":"2018-01-31T10:39:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T15:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thedetroitbureau.com\/?p=123055"},"modified":"2018-01-31T10:39:13","modified_gmt":"2018-01-31T15:39:13","slug":"toaster-shaped-nuro-r1-could-soon-pop-up-as-driverless-delivery-van","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/2018\/01\/toaster-shaped-nuro-r1-could-soon-pop-up-as-driverless-delivery-van\/","title":{"rendered":"Toaster-Shaped Nuro R1 Could Soon Pop Up as Driverless Delivery Van"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The R1 is about as long and tall as a Toyota Highlander, but barely half as wide.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It looks like a four-wheeled toaster, but when the Nuro R1 starts popping up later this year it will be bringing packages from online and local retail shops, according to the company\u2019s founders.<\/p>\n

The race to put self-driving vehicles on the road is rapidly heating up, and it\u2019s a question of which will come first: robot taxis or automated delivery vans. If Nuro has its way, it will get a head start on companies like Waymo and General Motors, which hope to launch the first driverless ride-sharing services sometime in 2019.<\/p>\n

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Tech Power!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Considering the tens of billions of dollars in goods that roll across the nation\u2019s highways each year, experts see a potentially lucrative market for driverless long-haul trucks. Several companies have already demonstrated prototypes, including Uber subsidiary Otto. But Nuro is targeting the final leg of the journey.<\/p>\n

“We designed the R1 to be flexible, so it can be used for everything from your e-commerce packages to deliveries from a local dry cleaner,”\u00a0said Dave Ferguson who, along with Nuro co-founder Jiajun Zhu, previously worked on Google\u2019s self-driving car program.<\/p>\n

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A driverless Otto semi-truck is shown hauling some autonomous Volvos developed for Uber.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They\u2019ve been joined by an assortment of autonomous vehicle engineers who\u2019ve logged time at General Motors, Tesla and on Apple\u2019s still secret self-driving program. Nuro claims to have locked down $92 million in funding from several high-profile venture capital firms, including Baynyan Capital and Greylock Partners.<\/p>\n

(Waymo buying “1,000s” of Chrysler vans for driverless ride-sharing service. <\/em>Click Here<\/span><\/a> for the latest news.)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong>Who Nuro\u2019s customers might be the start-up isn\u2019t yet revealing. But there are plenty of potential markets, both traditional delivery services FedEx and UPS, as well as start-ups like DoorDash and Postmates expressing interest in going driverless. Amazon recently filed a patent on what it described as a self-driving delivery vehicle. And Toyota showed off a similarly toaster-like concept, the e-Palette, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. It is envisioned as a multi-purpose vehicle that might serve as a ride-hailing vehicle during rush hour and then deliver packages at other times.<\/p>\n

Last autumn, Ford teamed up with Domino\u2019s on a test near the pizza company\u2019s Ann Arbor, Michigan headquarters. It relied on Ford Fusion sedans modified to drive autonomously \u2013 there actually was a backup \u201coperator\u201d in the vehicle but the windows were blacked out. Customers would place an order and then get an alert when one of the prototypes pulled up to their home or office with a code that could be entered into a keypad on the side of the vehicle. The customer then retrieved the pizza out of a special window.<\/p>\n

Another test program in Northern California is being run by start-up Udelv and backed by the high-end Draeger\u2019s Market chain. But, like the Ford\/Domino\u2019s project, the partners are using modified vans with a backup driver onboard.<\/p>\n

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Ford and Domino's partnered in a test program to deliver pizzas using autonomous vehicles.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nuro\u2019s ungainly little R1 was developed entirely in-house and will operate entirely on its own with no backup driver onboard.<\/p>\n

(Majority of Americans still wary of self-driving vehicles, but confidence growing. <\/em>Click Here<\/span><\/a> for results of new surveys.)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s the potential cost-savings which can add up quickly by taking the driver out of the truck. And freight and delivery services point out that there\u2019s currently a severe shortage of drivers, to begin with.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve built the full software stack from scratch. There are a lot of components that are shared with general self-driving, and some things that are a bit different,\u201d said co-founder Ferguson, stressing that Nuro is \u201cgeared toward this passenger-less, goods-only transportation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company is already running a small fleet of prototypes to test the capabilities of the R1. And while it has received a permit from California regulators to operate in the state it must still wait for approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration if it wants to roll out across country. That said, Congress is considering proposals that could soon permit automakers and tech companies to begin rolling out hundreds of thousands of vehicles on public roads across the country.<\/p>\n

As the Domino\u2019s experiment underscored, unmanned delivery vehicles like the Nuro R1 face some potentially obstacles, however, notably one dubbed the \u201clast 100-foot challenge.\u201d It\u2019s one thing for a driverless vehicle to pull up to an address, but getting a package into a customer\u2019s hands is another matter. For the pizza service\u2019s customers the trade-off was not having to tip a driver. But it\u2019s less clear whether customers for the likes of a UPS, Amazon or a grocery store would see the benefit in having to go outside for their packages, especially in inclement weather.<\/p>\n

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A Starship Technologies delivery robot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nuro considered, but ultimately abandoned, the idea of making R1 capable of also driving on sidewalks. But potential competitors are looking for ways to cross that last 100 feet. Daimler AG recently ran an experiment in Zurich using one of its vans equipped with a pair of drones that could drop packages on a customer\u2019s doorstep. Amazon has also been considering ways to use drones for deliveries. And another start-up, Starship Technologies<\/a> has already begun testing delivery robots designed to work on sidewalks in several U.S. and European locations.<\/p>\n

One way or the other, don\u2019t be surprised to see some of your goods, whether groceries or packages from Amazon, delivered robotically in the near future.<\/p>\n

(Nikola Motors picks Phoenix for $1b hydrogen semi-truck plant. <\/em>Click Here<\/span><\/a> for the breaking news.)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It looks like a four-wheeled toaster, but when the driverless Nuro R1 starts popping up later this year it will be bringing packages from online and local retail shops, according to the company\u2019s founders. TheDetroitBureau.com looks at the latest on driverless delivery technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,5,14,12,9],"tags":[],"make":[56,58],"post-state":[],"category_old":[150,151,313,123,318,319,248,243,136,312,291,177],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123055"},{"taxonomy":"make","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/make?post=123055"},{"taxonomy":"post-state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-state?post=123055"},{"taxonomy":"category_old","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category_old?post=123055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}