Amazon Warehouse Automation Challenge. As with everything, Amazon are cheapskates. The price money is just $25k, hardly appropriate for this. For how it is in those warehouses, check out fulfillment
2019-05-21: USPS Tests Self-Driving

For this pilot, the human driver will handle the truck on surface streets, but TuSimple is already looking to a second phase of the pilot, where the robot does all the work. Meanwhile, it’s 400-person team is working to expand the robot’s operating envelope. The system can handle high winds, night driving (handling high beams was a pain), and rain, while ice on the road remains “a nasty problem.” If it never succeeds, the postal service has a team of mules up for the task.

2020-03-20: Missed Logistics Opportunity

Suddenly the world has been thrust into a crisis with 3 interesting aspects:

1. A huge upswing in demand, and delivery companies are falling way behind.
2. A sudden desire to not have a delivery driver touch packages, and drivers don’t want to interact with people.
3. The roads in some areas have become almost deserted due to lockdowns.

What a glorious opportunity this could have been for the road based delivery vehicles. While they have not yet reached the safety level needed to do full time operations with no human on board in regular traffic, it’s quite possible that they can do it on mostly deserted streets. Particularly if low speed operations can be tolerated on those streets. However, even if that’s true, since nobody anticipated this, nobody has worked to build proof of that level of safety.

2020-06-26: Zoox

The ability to deliver anything in an Amazon warehouse on short notice will be a very attractive product. The cost of robot delivery will be low enough to be bundled in with Amazon Prime. If you can get anything in one of those giant Amazon warehouses in 30 minutes, that’s scary news for the rest of retail.

2020-12-14: Zoox robotaxi

this is interesting from a design perspective: what assumptions are no longer true and can be revised for a better experience? Passengers face one another, allowing for a more social experience. The interior is spartan, not the overcrowded complex dashboard of current cars and some robotaxi designs. Just a small display and charging port. The seats mix taxi goals (ease of cleaning and able to handle heavy use) with car design. The electric vehicle design allows a low center of gravity, and combined with wheels moved to the corners of the vehicle, a more flexible interior design with more space for the same footprint. Each wheel can also turn independently, allowing for an 8.6m turning radius. In many cases, it will not turn at all, when it wants to change direction of travel, it just changes. The vehicle is narrow and short enough, given that, to handle streets and driveways that might be a challenge for wider vehicles. Airbags are integrated into the special seats and their enclosing walls for extra crash safety.

2021-07-06: Posthuman Logistics

Outside of London is a massive supermarket—one that customers cannot enter. Instead it’s dedicated to fulfilling online orders. It’s filled with an upper-level cartesian grid swarming with over 2000 wheeled robots that zoom around in the X- and Y-axes. Beneath the robots’ wheels, each square of the grid is filled with up to 21 milk crates loaded with grocery products. The ‘bots can suck these bins up through their bottoms, then zip them over to the periphery, where additional sorting ‘bots pick-and-package them.

2023-02-23: Zoox goes public in California

Last week, the California DMV granted us our permit to operate our robotaxi autonomously on public roads. This weekend, we hit the road! It marked the first time in history that a purpose-built robotaxi—with no manual controls—drove autonomously on open public roads with passengers.