California-based Vayu Robotics has announced the first real world application of its AI-powered autonomous delivery robot, which is now being deployed in the US alongside a “large commercial customer” and promises to slash the cost of e-commerce deliveries.
According to the firm, Vayu is the world’s first on-road delivery robot which combines AI models with lidar-less, low-cost passive sensors. The robot can carry up to 100lbs and travel at speeds of up to 20mph.
It is being debuted by a large e-commerce player in the US, which has signed a deal with Vayu for the deployment of 2,500 robots to enable ultra-fast goods delivery. Vayu also noted that contracts with “similar commercial customers” are also in the pipeline.
Furthermore, the team is working with a leading global robotics manufacturer to replace lidar sensors with Vayu’s sensing technology for other robotic applications.
What makes Vayu unique
Traditional mobile robotics rely on costly lidar sensors and software modules built to do one task at a time, leading to expensive hardware and fragile software unable to handle new scenarios, according to Vayu. The firm’s robot does the opposite, it noted.
The company has combined a transformer-based mobility foundation model with a powerful passive sensor that, together, eliminate the need for lidar. As a result, Vayu’s delivery robot operates autonomously without pre-mapping the roads it intends to drive on and is capable of navigating inside stores, on city streets, and unloading packages on driveways or porches.
“This model is the first-of-its-kind, offering the most cost-effective, safe, reliable delivery system on the market,” Vayu noted.
“The unique set of technologies we have developed at Vayu have allowed us to solve problems that have plagued delivery robots over the past decade, and finally create a solution that can actually be deployed at scale and enable the cheap transport of goods everywhere,” explained Vayu Robotics CEO, Anand Gopalan.
About Vayu
Vayu was co-founded in 2020 by three veterans from the robotics and mobility industry – Anand Gopalan, who took the world’s leading lidar supplier Velodyne public in 2020; Mahesh Krishnamurthi, formerly Apple SPG and Lyft; and Nitish Srivastava, also from Apple SPG and Geoffrey Hinton’s AI lab in the University of Toronto. Geoffrey Hinton is also an advisor to the company.
After working in major robotics and autonomy software for two decades, the trio realized large volume robotics applications, like robotics delivery, could only be unlocked by inventing a new technology stack that involved lower cost hardware and more robust software.
“Our software is robot form factor agnostic and we have already deployed it across several wheeled form factors. In the near future, Vayu’s software technology will enable the movement of quadrupedal and bipedal robots, allowing us to expand into those markets as well,” said Gopalan.
Future plans
Vayu has previously raised US$12.7 million from Khosla Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures to fuel its mission to remove the hardware and software bottlenecks that have “stunted the growth of e-commerce".
Looking ahead, Vayu’s founders believe their revolutionary low-cost robotics nervous system can power a new wave of mobile robots in other use cases, too. “Autonomous delivery robots are only the tip of the iceberg,” added Gopalan.
