Vayu, a robotics and AI specialist, today unveiled One, a new delivery robot designed to navigate autonomously in stores and on roads at speeds of up to 20 mph. The company also received its first order for a fleet of robots for commercial operation.
Vayu Robotics is a team of engineers and business leaders focused on implementing next-generation AI technologies in the autonomous delivery sector to contribute to a more sustainable and connected world.
According to the company’s website, “Vayu” comes from Sanskrit and represents “the intelligence that enables all movement in the universe and all the movement of energy.” The company’s three co-founders joined forces after holding roles at Velodyne, Apple and Lyft, combining decades of knowledge in robotics and autonomous software.
Prior to today’s news, the startup had raised $12.7 million to develop a low-cost “robot nervous system” that will be at the core of its new autonomous delivery robots, which were officially unveiled today.
Source: Vayu Robotics
Vayu launches new delivery robot and gets its first customer
According to a release from Vayu Robotics, the company took the opposite design approach to many of its competitors in the autonomous delivery space today: Rather than relying on expensive LiDAR sensors and software modules that can only perform one task at a time, the Vayu team combined a transformer-based mobility foundation model with passive sensors to alleviate the need for LiDAR entirely.
The result is a new autonomous delivery robot called Vayu One that can operate safely inside stores, on streets, sidewalks, and roadways without having to map those roads beforehand. The small autonomous vessel, shown above, can transport cargo up to 100 pounds at speeds up to 20 miles per hour.
As a result, Vayu is calling its delivery robot a “first” for road transport. While there aren’t many roads that require a tiny robot that can only go 20 miles per hour, it’s still a big achievement in this field. Vayu CEO Anand Gopalan said:
The unique technology we developed at Vayu allows us to solve the problems that have plagued delivery robots for the past decade, finally creating a solution that can be deployed at scale to transport goods anywhere, cheaply.
Following its public launch today, Vayu announced that its delivery robot is ready for commercial deployment, and has already secured orders for 2,500 units from a “leading e-commerce company.”
Looking to the future, Vayu says it is already partnering with some of the world’s leading robot manufacturers to replace the LiDAR sensors with its own sensing technology to support robotics applications beyond autonomous delivery, with plans to adapt the technology to different modes of transportation in the future.
Our software is robot form factor agnostic and has already been deployed on several wheeled form factors. In the near future, Vayu’s software technology will enable movement in quadrupedal and bipedal robots, enabling us to penetrate those markets as well.
Check out the video below to see the Vayu One delivery robot in action:
Source: Vayu Robotics
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