American firm Vayu Robotics has announced the release of the world’s first on-road Delivery Robot that combines the power of AI foundation models with lidar-less, low-cost passive sensors.
Traditional mobile robotics rely on “costly” lidar sensors and software modules.
The company has combined a transformer-based mobility foundation model with a powerful passive sensor that in turn eliminates the need for lidar.
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.
It can carry up to 100 lbs at under 20mph.
Vayu founded in 2020 has already raised $12.7 million 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 its robotics nervous system can power a “new wave of mobile robots” in other use cases, too.
“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” said Anand Gopalan, CEO of Vayu Robotics.
Vayu’s Delivery Robots are already being debuted, the company recently signed a commercial agreement with a large e-commerce player to deploy 2500 robots to enable ultra-fast goods delivery, with similar commercial customers in the pipeline.
The team is also working with a leading 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. 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” said Kanu Gulati, Partner at Khosla Ventures.
Anand 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.”
