Vayu ditches lidar so retailers can afford robot deliveries
- August 5, 2024
- Steve Rogerson
In a move to slash the cost of ecommerce deliveries, Vayu Robotics has developed an on-road delivery robot that combines the power of AI foundation models with lidar-less, low-cost passive sensors.
Consumers rely on ecommerce platforms to deliver groceries, electronics, apparel and more. And while the number of deliveries is skyrocketing – by 2027, 23% of American retail purchases are expected to take place online – cost per delivery remains stubbornly high.
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. Vayu’s robot does the opposite.
The company has combined a transformer-based mobility foundation model with a passive sensor that, together, eliminate the need for lidar. As a result, the 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, carrying up to 45kg at under 32kmph. This model is said to offer the most cost-effective, safe, reliable delivery system on the market.
Vayu was co-founded by three veterans from the robotics and mobility industry: Anand Gopalan, former CEO who took 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. Hinton is also an advisor to the company.
After working in major robotics and autonomy software for two decades, the trio realised large volume robotics applications, such as robotics delivery, could only be unlocked by inventing a technology stack that involved lower cost hardware and more robust software.
“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 can actually be deployed at scale and enable the cheap transport of goods everywhere,” said Gopalan.
The robots are already being deployed in real-world applications. The company recently signed a commercial agreement with a large ecommerce player to deploy 2500 robots to enable fast goods delivery, with similar commercial customers in the pipeline. The team is also working with a global robotics manufacturer to replace lidar sensors with Vayu’s sensing technology for other robotic applications.
“At Khosla Ventures, we believe in backing businesses where critical and differentiated technologies can unlock a large market,” said Kanu Gulati, partner at investor Khosla Ventures (www.khoslaventures.com). “Vayu is a great example of this where they have deployed novel sensing and their AI foundation models to a robotic challenge that can have immense economic and societal impact.”
Gopalan added: “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.”
Vayu (www.vayurobotics.com) has previously raised $12.7m to fuel its mission to remove the hardware and software bottlenecks that have stunted the growth of ecommerce. Looking ahead, Vayu’s founders believe their 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,” said Gopalan.