Robots Do Contactless Delivery
Contactless delivery had started to become the standard method of delivery even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. This is a method for delivering food, grocery shopping, medicine, and anything else you might buy online. One of the reasons for this popularity is the increase in online shopping.
Contactless delivery makes sure you have as little contact as possible with the delivery person. It also ensures that as few people handle the goods, you have bought as possible. This is partly necessary because of the safety protocols that COVID-19 has imposed on people; it’s also because contactless delivery reduces the costs of preparation and delivery considerably for businesses as well as customers.
Several technologies have made contactless delivery possible. These technologies range from artificial intelligence to automated methods of communication with the customers and new payment methods.
Which technologies make contactless delivery possible?
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has touched many different industries in the last few years. It has made its mark in contactless delivery as well. In this area, Artificial Intelligence comes in the form of autonomous delivery. Autonomous delivery comes in two forms.
First, there is the matter of delivering goods from city to city or from state to state. This requires trucks to haul the goods over long distances. Using autonomous trucks can save lots of time and energy. Considering that autonomous trucks pick the shortest road with the least amount of traffic, autonomous truck delivery can reduce air pollution and road accidents to a great extent.
Second, we have deliveries over short distances. Autonomous delivery over short distances can be done through delivery robots, delivery drones, and curb delivery and notification. There have been 193 new delivery robot deployments in the United States in 2020. This number is unprecedented, and it’s expected to continue increasing as well.
Supply Chain Visibility
Real-time supply chain visibility enables the customers to track their parcel every step of the way out of the warehouse and in the customer’s hand. This can be done in several ways. Firstly, the warehouse activities can be registered and published into the application on the customers’ mobile phones.
What’s more, the trucks carrying the goods can send signals to the customers about their locations as they move towards their destinations. Using this method, customers feel safer about having their goods delivered, the time of their delivery, and the level of customer satisfaction.
Data Analysis
Data analysis is one of the most powerful tools that can help a business go online. First and foremost, it allows companies to organize advertisement campaigns for their online section. What’s more, by locating loyal customers, companies can arrange offers and benefits for them. Data analytics can also find potential customers who live nearby and make them irresistible offers.
Data analysis can provide businesses with invaluable information. Using this information, decisions can be made about optimizing an online business in the best possible way. Something else that data analysis can do for companies is managing warehouses. Businesses that offer food or other expirable goods can use this system to prevent their products from going to waste by optimally arranging their warehouses and fridges.
Warehouse Robotics
One of the places where people have the most contact with goods and fresh produce is warehouses. Automating warehouses is a huge step that businesses can take towards contactless delivery. In this type of warehouse management, robots do all the stages of storing the goods and then recalling them as necessary.
Which companies help make contactless delivery possible?
Waymo
Waymo is Google’s sister company. This company has been developing driverless cars for over a decade. The driverless taxies have now been operational in the state of Arizona since 2020. Waymo has also designed and manufactured driverless trucks that are perfect for contactless delivery.
Maymo’s advanced machine learning algorithms allow the whole planning, routing, and scheduling process to be done automatically. This way, the fastest and safest routes are chosen to ensure the goods arrive safely and efficiently.
Aurora
Aurora is a startup company founded by a former executive from Google, Tesla, and Uber. This company partnered with Volvo in 2021 to launch its first autonomous trucks on the roads. The 690 million dollar funding that Aurora has received will help this company fully develop its hardware and software systems.
Volvo (VLVLY) has long been one of the largest truck manufacturing factories in the world. This company had a revenue of 40.1 billion dollars in 2020. The stock for this company is currently sold for %25.10 per share. This stock is predicted to grow by about 23% in the next year.
TuSimple
Another company that’s working to put autonomous trucks on the road is TuSimple. This company is based in San Francisco, USA, and it was founded in 2015. The trucks made in this company have the most advanced navigation and freight control systems.
TuSimple had a revenue of 1.84 million dollars in 2020. The interesting point is that this revenue had an increase of almost 160% since the previous year. The stock for TuSimple is currently traded for $35.44 per share.
Starship Technologies
Starship Technologies is a company founded in 2014 by a group of Skype executives. This company is based in San Francisco, but its main engineering office is located in Estonia. Starship Technologies makes autonomous robots that are able to deliver food and other products to the customers’ doors without them having to contact a single person. The robots can carry the customers’ shopping to their doorstep within a 4-mile radius. The only thing that the customers need to do is make a request through a mobile application and then follow the parcel’s progress on the same app.
Starship Technologies has had a total of 99.2 million dollars of funding since its foundation in 2014. Some of the company’s prominent investors are Daimler, K2 Global, Metaplanet Holdings, and many more. The latest round of funding happened in 2020 with the amount of 17 million dollars in seed funding.
6 River Systems
6 River Systems has designed a warehouse automation robot called Chuck. Chuck is an autonomous robot that knows where each item in the warehouse is and leads the workers right to it. Once the item has been loaded on the robot, it goes back to the workstation automatically. This leaves the worker to work with another robot.
Using the 6 River Systems, Chuck doubles the warehouses’ efficiency. It also significantly reduces the need for manual labor and human workforce. 6 River Systems was founded in 2015 by ex-Kiva executives. By 2018, this company had manufactured and delivered over one million Chuck Robots in different sizes to customers.
6 River systems was acquired by Shopify in 2019, a deal that cost 450 million dollars. Since then, this company has started partnerships with companies in different countries, including the UK, the USA, Canada, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Amazon Robotics
Amazon Robotics started when Amazon bought Kiva Systems in 2012 for 775 million dollars. This company then renamed Kiva to Amazon Robotics and started using Kiva robotics in its warehouses. The Kiva robots are the reason Amazon can deliver hundreds of thousands of goods within 24 hours to customers’ doorsteps.
The Kiva robots are 30 centimeters high, but they are capable of lifting 450 kilos of weight. This size and capacity for lifting enable the robots to carry whole shelves of goods around without needing a human operator at all. The Kiva robots have increased the capacity of Amazon’s warehouses by 50%. They have also made the retrieval and delivery systems three times faster.
Since acquiring Kiva, Amazon has perfected the design of its warehouse robots. The new Pegasus and Xanthus robots are considerably thinner. What’s more, they are capable of hauling up to 600 kilograms of weight. More than 200,000 robots are operating in Amazon warehouses. These robots are controlled by an advanced, cloud-based air traffic controlling system. So, all these robots with shelves on them can move in perfect harmony to increase speed and efficiency.
How large is the contactless delivery market size?
In mere ten years, global contactless delivery is expected to grow by over 24%. In 2021, this market is estimated to be 11.90 billion dollars. In 2030, it will reach the stounding number of 84.72 billion dollars. With the advent of more advanced robots, more efficient warehouses, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, and finally, autonomous delivery vehicles, this industry is expected to grow even larger in the future.
