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Jul 15, 2022
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'Segway sees a future for sidewalk delivery robots and is now preparing to be the burgeoning industry’s go-to manufacturer. The company, which has supplied electric scooters for almost all of the major shared micromobility operators, is partnering with Los Angeles-based delivery robot startup Coco to build 1,000 partially automated, remotely piloted sidewalk robots. Coco will begin deploying the robots in Los Angeles and two other U.S. cities during the first quarter of 2022. This new shipment of Coco 1 robots, as the company is branding them, will add to its existing fleet of 100 Coco 0 units, a “box on wheels” that the company first built to prove out its business model. Coco has also placed an order for an additional 1,200 vehicles, which it expects to be able to deploy by May or June 2022, pending potential contracts, according to Sahil Sharma, SVP of vehicles at Coco. Segway has been conducting R&D on robotics for years, and even formed a dedicated division in 2016. That was the same year the company unveiled its Loomo robot, which is basically a scooter base with a little robotic head that includes an Intel RealSense RGB-D camera, speech recognition and self-driving capabilities. Loomo was more of an experiment than a business opportunity; this partnership with Coco is the first time the company is deploying its “robotic mobile platforms” at scale for delivery. Tony Ho, Segway’s VP of global business development, said it also signals a longer-term shift into the robotic delivery space. “This is just the beginning of our partnership,” Ho told TechCrunch. “We will stay on the product side of things, and Coco will be the operators. So it’s a bit similar to the micromobility space where we provide the vehicles and hardware and they provide the relationship with the city and the staff and the whole operation behind it. Right now, we’re seeing this almost like it was with scooters in 2017, where the whole industry is booming. It’s a land grab.” Segway’s e-scooter and e-bike business is thriving, says Ho, noting it will provide leverage to scale growth in robotics by sharing vehicle learnings and supply chain resources. “Coco is a really young company, so they were smart enough to focus on what they do best and outsource the supply chain scaling to Segway,” said Ho, who mentioned the partnership with Coco is not exclusive. “We are very serious about this and it’s our company strategy to back the winning horses to scale up quickly.” The market size of autonomous delivery robots globally is expected to reach $236.59 million by 2027, and a range of players have sprouted recently to try to control a piece of that pie. Starship Technologies, a competitor in the sidewalk space, has raised a total of $102 million worth of funding; Kiwibot recently expanded its reach among college campuses; and Nuro, which operates on the roads, just raised $600 million and announced a partnership with 7-Eleven. In August, Coco raised a $36 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $43 million, money that was in part used to fund the Segway vehicles. Segway says it expects sidewalk robots to be the most efficient method of achieving first and last-mile delivery, particularly in dense urban areas during rush hour. “From the product point of view, a simpler design with make operations more reliable, less breakdowns, lower upfront capital investment,” said Ho. “Labor shortages caused by the pandemic only accelerated the acceptance of robots. Also, slower moving and smaller payload vehicles are pedestrian friendly on sidewalks and are welcomed by cities.” #coco1 #robot #autonomousvechile #autonomousrobot #segway #deliveryrobot #pizzadeliveryrobot #fooddeliveryrobot Copyright Notice: We make these videos to Entertain people and Educatethem. We do not own the clips and music we use in most cases. Our understanding is that it is in correlation to Fair Right Use, however, given that it is open to interpretation, if any owners of the content clips would like us to remove the video, we have no problem with that and will do so as fast as possible. Please email us if you have any concerns at [email protected] Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976,allowance is made for \"fair use\" for purposes such as criticism,comment, news reporting, teaching scholarship, and research. Fair usise a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise beinfringing. Non profiteducational or personal use tips the balance infavor of fair us cc0cc by SA 10. ce by SA 2.0, ce by SA 3.0 and ce by SA 4.0 license https://cxxreativecommons.org/licensed 1) This video has no negative impact on the original works (It would actually be positive for them) 2)I only used bits and pieces of videos to get the point across where necessary.'
Tags: Coco Robot , Coco Self Driving Robot , Coco Delivery Robot , The New Coco One , Coco One
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