The race to build autonomous delivery vehicles is well underway and more companies are delving into the world of autonomous vehicles. Cartken is a company that was formed in fall 2019 after Google decided not to compete with Amazon in shopping and stop their delivery robot development, techcrunch reports.
Unlike Amazon who obtained the robot producers, Dispatch to help make its delivery robot dream a reality, Google used their own engineers and logistics experts to work on the development of the bot in-house which they soon pulled back from.
Cartken is being very secretive on their plans for this and the future, but their website is showing clear evidence for the development of autonomous delivery vehicles through a satellite image of a residential estate and the obscured outline of a delivery bot.
I wonder how long it will be before we see more autonomous robots trailing our streets, will we see robot lanes being built into roads? If delivery companies wanted to get really brutal with competition they could always start smashing their rivals bots to pieces in the street… like Robot Wars.
Autonomous delivery is hitting the road
Nuro an autonomous vehicle company created by Google engineers, have just revealed that they will be the first driverless road vehicle delivering packages instead of people to receive the all clear for road driving in the US by the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
One question raised on the subject of autonomous vehicles is on safety and their ability to make life of death decisions. In the announcement, Nuro they made a point on the safety of their vehicles.
“We were convinced that such a class of vehicle had the potential to be safer than passenger vehicles: more nimble, narrower, and better able to prioritize the well-being of other road users. And by building such a vehicle we could also lower vehicle cost, improve the customer experience”
– Dave Ferguson, Co-Founder, Nuro
I’m very interested to see how safety is approached with the production of driverless vehicles and what companies will do to implement it.