Nuro is focused on last-mile deliveries with its completely driverless prototype
And their timing couldn’t be better. The converging trends of robotics, self-driving cars, and e-commerce are leading to an explosion of interest in the last-mile delivery challenge. Consumers are ordering more items online than ever before, and there is a growing expectation for shorter and shorter delivery windows. A
put the global price tag of last-mile delivery every year at around $86 billion, with staggering year-over-year growth rates.
While it works out the kinks in its ,
for an autonomous ground vehicle. Toyota unveiled its
concept at CES this year. Meanwhile,
has sidewalk-only delivery robots making trips in California, Washington, DC, Germany, and the UK. Last year, Ford Motor Company teamed up with Domino’s . And later today, a Northern Californian startup called
what it calls “the world’s first public-road autonomous delivery test,” in which a self-driving van (with human safety driver) will deliver goods from the high-end Draeger’s Market chain in the Bay Area city of San Mateo.
Nuro is taking a different approach. Rather than dress up a Lexus crossover or a Ford Focus in self-driving hardware and throw some grocery sacks inside, their engineers have built something entirely new from the ground up. At first glance, Nuro’s R1 prototype (just an internal nickname and not the official name) looks like a giant lunchbox on wheels, or maybe even a mobile toaster. If anything, Nuro’s first vehicle looks more like the original “Firefly” prototypes that
last summer than anything you’d see on the road today.
a giant lunchbox on wheels
But a closer inspection reveals that the “handle” on the roof is actually a platform for the vehicle’s sensor array, which includes LIDAR, cameras, and radars. And a peek through the windshield will also reveal the complete absence of traditional controls like steering wheels, foot pedals, and gear shifts. There’s no driver seat because humans were not meant to operate this vehicle.
That said, Nuro is designing its vehicles for remote operation, placing it alongside startups such as
and others that are working on remotely operated driverless vehicles. But real-time teleoperation has its challenges, such as signal latency and other issues. To gain enough confidence for public deployment, Nuro is using a fleet of six self-driving cars to collect data and optimize routes, which then gets fed into its prototype vehicles. Nuro has received a permit from the California DMV and plans to start testing on public roads later this year. But the company will need sign-off from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before it can operate in states where regulation prohibits completely human-free driving.
“We’ve 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,” said Dave Ferguson who, along with Jiajun Zhu, . “We’ve been able to architecture this thing from scratch, geared toward this passenger-less, goods-only transportation.”
Ferguson said they considered building the R1 to drive on sidewalks but ultimately decided to make it road-worthy instead. The vehicle is about as tall as a Toyota Highlander but only about half the width, which Ferguson said is one of its standout features. This skinniness translates into a 3 to 4-foot “buffer” around the R1 so other vehicles and pedestrians can maneuver safely around it.
“Even if you have the perfect self-driving vehicle, if someone pops out between two parked cars and it’s within your stopping distance, you can’t prevent that accident,” he said. “Whereas if you have a vehicle that’s half the width, and you’ve got an extra three or four feet of clearance, you can avoid it... and you have room to maneuver around them. You can better design the vehicle to mitigate the severity of any accident.”
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
There are some challenges to Nuro’s business model, specifically how customers will receive their deliveries from the self-driving delivery pod. No driver means no one to ring your doorbell or trudge up four flights of stairs to hand over your pad thai. Ferguson says he envisions customers using — what else? — an app to inform them when the vehicle has arrived in front of their building or in their driveway. They would then be given a code that pops open the vehicle’s side hatches so they can retrieve their items. They are also considering using facial recognition technology. But what’s to prevent people from stealing someone else’s deliveries? There are still a lot of details that need to be worked out, Ferguson acknowledged.
No driver means no one to ring your doorbell
Ferguson and Zhu are two guys who know more than a little about autonomous driving. Zhu was one of the founding engineers of Google’s self-driving team, while Ferguson was a leading software engineer on the team. Both left Google at the same time as its , who has since gone on to start his own self-driving company, .
Aside from a brief internship at Intel, Zhu had spent much of his career at Google and was the self-driving team’s principal software engineer from . Ferguson came to Google in 2011 after a stint at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, which has been at the forefront of the autonomous driving revolution. He served as the principal computer-vision and machine-learning engineer at Google before leaving with Zhu in late 2016 to start Nuro. Since then, they’ve attracted talent from the likes of Google, Apple, Tesla, Waymo, and GM to build out their team.
Nuro has already raised $92 million in two rounds of fundraising and is in talks with a number of retailers and delivery providers about possible partnerships. A likelier outcome is Nuro gets quickly bought up by a company like Amazon. The race to develop self-driving technology has sparked a furious round of mergers and acquisitions over the past few years, the rate of which has yet to subside.
Ferguson said that he hopes Nuro’s fresh approach to self-driving — focusing on delivering goods rather than people — hopefully means that Nuro will stand out from the pack.
“Almost all of the big players in self-driving passenger transportation are really, really focused on that application because for many of them it’s an existential threat,” Ferguson said. “And most of them feel that goods transportation is going to be a follow-on application. For us, we felt, in and of its own right, it was an important enough problem and one that we could make real headway on earlier than passenger transportation.”
He added, “That makes us sound smarter or more cunning than we are ... It makes sense for them to be focused on that, but it also leaves open a pretty big opportunity to go after this other area.”
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June 14, 2017
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Self-driving cars: the race is on to make them viable
By Hu Yumo |
00:01 UTC+8 June 14, 2017
Print Edition
CHINA, which prides itself as the world&s biggest promoter of electric cars, is also seeking to be a leader in the advancing technology of self-driving cars. It&s a step-by-step process.
The first step is applying some autonomous driving features, such as automatic emergency braking and colli&sion avoidance, to existing auto production. The government expects half of new delivered vehicles to be equipped with driver-assistance features by the end of 2020, according to an industry development plan issued in April.
China will support the entry of more sophisticated hands-free vehicles in the market by 2025, according to the plan. By that year, the government expects 80 percent of new de&livered vehicles to be equipped with autonomous driving features.
China is the world&s biggest auto market, so government development plans are not something that automakers will ignore. Major carmakers and auto-parts suppliers are stepping up efforts to test self-driving cars and technologies in China.
&Car manufacturers, auto-parts companies, technology companies, information tech&nology firms, and start-ups are actively working in the field of autonomous driving in China,& said Bill Peng, a partner with PwC&s Strategy&. &Capital is flowing into that market.&
Germany&s BMW announced earlier this month that it has completed more than 16,000 kilometers of autonomous test driving in China. About 40 BMW 7 series prototype cars will be tested on roads globally this year, the company said.
&We will continue to accu&mulate basic data to promote autonomous driving technol&ogy development in China,& said Robert Bruckmeier, vice president of the connected and automated driving lab at BMW China Services Ltd. &BMW has showcased its Level 3 and 4 au&tonomous driving technologies, with the demonstration of its prototype car in the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle (Shanghai) Pilot Zone.&
While traditional car manu&facturers such as BMW are applying self-driving technol&ogy to their own cars, Baidu, one of the largest Internet companies in the world, has announced plans to collaborate with automakers by building an autonomous car platform called Project Apollo.
The platform will host devel&opments in vehicles, hardware, software and cloud data ser&vices for self-driving vehicles.
Baidu also said it will intro&duce autonomous driving in restricted environments in July, expanding to uncongested road&ways by the end of this year. By 2020, the company said it plans to introduce fully autonomous driving.
Road testing
Baidu conducted road tests of its autonomous vehicles in Beijing in December 2015. Last November, it held open trial operations of the vehicles in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province.
During the recent CES Asia exhibition in Shanghai, Baidu offered test rides of its au&tonomous driving vehicle. The self-driving car has a camera inside the car in front of the driver. The camera is used to capture the surrounding road conditions and upload the in&formation to a computer placed in the trunk to control the vehicle.
&This self-driving model is in collaboration with Great Wall Motor Co,& said Wang Fei, who works at Baidu.
The test rides had the car doing laps on a test track in an enclosed environment. The steering wheel, brakes and gas pedal were automatically op&erated. A working staff from Baidu sat in the driver&s seat lest anything go awry.
&There are two kinds of au&tonomous driving,& said David Zhang, an independent automo&tive consultant. &One consists of a series of sensors and laser radar, and the cost is relatively high. Baidu&s self-driving car is mainly operated through the use of a camera in front of the car, which is a more economical alternative. The computer can survey surrounding road condi&tions, do data processing and handle vehicle control.&
Internet companies and carmakers are converging in re&search and development, noted Yang Jing, an associate direc&tor in Fitch Ratings& Asia-Pacific corporate research division in Shanghai.
&Car manufacturers can provide the car itself, while In&ternet companies such as Baidu are adept at data processing and high-definition maps in China,& she said. &Both sides need to work with each other to promote the development of autonomous driving.&
German auto-parts giant Continental has just unveiled a website for Chinese netizens as a communications forum on autonomous driving. The web&site includes the latest news and insights on the industry.
&Chinese automotive and technology industries have been strongly focused on de&veloping autonomous driving technology in recent years,& noted Enno Tang, president and chief executive officer of Con&tinental China. &Autonomous driving has become a popular topic. That&s why Continental is launching the website as a long-term initiative, inviting stakeholders in China.&
Werner Koestler, senior vice president of Continental, said Chinese consumers are more welcoming toward the concept of self-driving cars than people in Germany.
&Governments support and consumer motivation are two key elements promoting the development of autonomous driving in China,& he said.
The road ahead
But the road ahead is not all smooth sailing. Mishaps in street tests with autonomous vehicles around the world still grab headlines and stoke safety concerns. There is still a lot of mileage between vision and reality.
&Autonomous driving is a &foreseeable future,& which means it is still far away from today&s roads,& said Kevin Li, director of auto industry at Strategy Analytics. &It is a com&bination of big data, in-depth machine learning and high-def&inition maps. If a company can meet all of those requirements, then the cost of self-driving cars will be reduced and technology will be competitive. At present, it is still far away from the mass production.&
Yuan Liusheng, an analyst with WAYS Information Tech&nology Co, said regulations governing autonomous driv&ing in China still need to be formulated and infrastructure facilities need to be adapted to self-driving cars in the future.
Japan and several European countries are reportedly draft&ing common standards for autonomous driving, but at the regulatory level, the US leads the pack.
&Road and traffic conditions in China are more complicated than in the US,& said consultant Zhang. &That adds to the diffi&culty of testing self-driving cars in central areas of cities for the foreseeable future.&
According to an industry re&port by Nielsen and ifeng.com, it will take 10 to 15 years for autonomous driving to come into the mainstream market of China.
Consumers, for their part, like the idea. About two-thirds of respondents in the report&s survey said self-driving cars are the future of automobiles, while about a fifth said they think autonomous driving still needs time and regulation. Only 14 percent of respondents said it will be hard to introduce au&tonomous driving in China.
The survey said the primary concern among consumers is safety and who bears the cost and responsibility for any traf&fic accidents that may occur. They are also leery about the sticker prices for self-driving cars.
&Consumer acceptance of au&tonomous driving is relatively high,& said Peng. &About 70 per&cent of the Chinese consumers buy a first car every year. They are quite nervous when driving. Self-driving features are more easily accepted by these con&sumers. Autonomous driving is also seen as a godsend for those stuck sitting in traffic gridlock in urban centers.&
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