Delivery Robots Are Your Friends, Says Delivery-Robot Company

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The Delivery Robots Are Your Friends, Says Delivery-Robot Company Texas Monthly

Everybody who sees the new delivery driver for Southside Flying Pizza in Austin wants to stop and meet her. She’s short, a little clumsy, and right now, she needs help from a buddy when making her rounds, to ensure she doesn’t accidentally miss a stop sign or neglect to notice a speeding pickup truck coming around a blind curve in the city’s Travis Heights neighborhood, where she lives. Her name, indicated clearly on a sticker on her back, is 17, and she is one of a handful of REV-1 delivery robots, created by autonomous robotics company Refraction AI, out hustling pizzas to customers near Austin’s famous South Congress strip.

The way Refraction’s delivery bots work is straightforward: a customer goes to a restaurant’s website and places a delivery order, the same way they would if a human were going to be bringing them their food. (Southside Flying Pizza was the initial restaurant partner upon Refraction’s Austin launch in mid-June, with more coming in the next few weeks.) The robot, which is essentially a gray plastic trunk that stands a little taller than waist level and is built on a frame like that of a recumbent bicycle, then gets sent off from the “nest” where it awaits its assignment—currently, the only nest is at Refraction’s office a few blocks off South Congress—and on to the restaurant. When it arrives, an employee loads the pizza into the cargo bin, and then the little robot courier begins its appointed round, ambling peppily on the right-hand side of the road or in the bike lane, mostly on side streets, to bring the pizza to its hungry recipient. Because this is all early going for Refraction’s efforts in Austin, all deliveries are currently accompanied by a Robot Safety Operator, a human who stays in constant communication with a programmer at the company’s headquarters as he or she bodyguards the robot, training the AI to identify speed bumps on the road and pausing at intersections to help spot traffic that the still-learning software will better understand in the future. For 17’s delivery, the bodyguard is Riley, a friendly native Austinite on an electric scooter. Besides guiding 17 on its path until it eventually outgrows the need for his services, his primary other responsibility seems to be saying “it’s a delivery robot” to all of the many pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists who stop in their tracks to ask “what is that?” when they encounter the REV-1.

Riley, 17, and I make quite a trio as we meander through the neighborhood at around six miles an hour—the robot in front, Riley scootering a safe distance behind it, and me a few feet behind him on a bike. But 17 is the star of the show, and most folks seem to enjoy the novelty of seeing a delivery robot when they spot it. Right now, it is a unique presence on Austin’s streets, one of only a handful of Refraction delivery robots currently in operation. In the first week of the pilot program, Southside only deploys the bots on weekdays, with an extremely limited range, though Refraction says that they’re capable of a delivery radius of about three miles. “They’re supplemental,” Kevin Jamison, manager at Southside Flying Pizza’s South Congress location, told me. “We use them when we don’t have a driver available.” The restaurant also employs human delivery drivers, and works with the various delivery apps—though those, Jamison notes, cost the restaurant a few dollars more per delivery, and robots don’t need to be tipped. The robots are a bit of a novelty for the pizzeria, too. When I stopped by the restaurant to tail 17 on a delivery, the employees behind the counter, who had yet to meet one, made jokes about being replaced by the robots from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But the robots won’t stay novel for long, if Refraction grows into the kind of company that its CEO, Luke Schneider—a class of 1990 UT-Austin grad who’s spent much of the past fifteen years in executive roles at car-sharing companies Zipcar, Silvercar, and Flexcar—envisions. Schneider sees a big future for autonomous delivery robots, and one that can get on the road a whole lot faster than the self-driving cars that the world has been waiting to see launch en masse for the better part of a decade now.

Schneider sees delivery robots as fundamentally different from self-driving cars. Full-sized autonomous vehicles have been a nut that nobody—not Google, Uber, Tesla, or the big automakers—has been able to confidently crack, the sort of ever-tantalizing technology that’s somehow always still about five years away. And the stakes of getting it wrong are high. When driverless cars crash or hit a pedestrian, people die. That’s not so much a concern with Refraction’s delivery robots, which max out at around twelve miles an hour. A pedestrian who gets into a collision with 17 might suffer some bruises; if a truck crashes into the robot, it’s only going to crush a pizza. Recumbent bike frames outfitted with robotic technology and an AI system are a lot cheaper for the company to mass-produce than full-sized vehicles, too—which means that the robot-delivery revolution might start sooner than our eventual driverless-car future. It may even have already begun: in Houston, a different driverless bot delivered groceries, medicine, and, yes, pizza during the pandemic, and ...

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Robots have started to share the bike lane in Austin to deliver pizza Marketplace.org

Austin, Texas, is one of the latest American cities where robots are now making deliveries — and competing with people for space on the road.

A fleet of 10 such robot vehicles, which look like futuristic ice cream carts, has started deliveries for the Austin chain Southside Flying Pizza.

The company behind the robots is Michigan-based Refraction AI, which has been operating in Ann Arbor since 2019. The company’s REV-1 robot can go up to 15 miles an hour with somebody monitoring journeys over the internet. For now, an attendant follows the robot on an electric scooter while the AI learns Austin’s streets.

“From an affordability perspective, that’s really about getting access to delivery for lots more people than have it today,” Refraction AI CEO Luke Schneider said. “We can expand the opportunities for restaurants and retailers, and that’s kind of what we’ve set out to do.”

The idea is that hiring one person to monitor multiple robots over the internet costs less than hiring a bunch of people to make deliveries by bike or car.

The REV-1 is modeled on a recumbent bike — with two wheels in the front and one in the back — which is why it uses the bicycle lane. Even though it’s supposed to yield to humans, some cyclists say they’re worried.

“My personal view is I don’t believe these belong in the bike lane,” said Jake Boone, an avid cyclist and a member of the city of Austin’s Bicycle Advisory Council. “I almost feel like ...

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How fast are they? Do they have a bungee-cord mount?