Vayu Robotics has just unveiled its inaugural autonomous delivery robot. The autonomous delivery robot, dubbed The One, can seamlessly interact with warehouse staff to prepare customer orders, then independently traverse city streets at a maximum speed of 20 miles per hour to deliver the products. Business deployment has begun.
Companies such as Kuri, Savioke, Robby Technologies, and others have been testing various models of supply robots on campus and neighborhood routes over the years. A California-based startup is pioneering a novel approach by developing an autonomous bot equipped with a cutting-edge, cost-effective vision system and artificial intelligence training that enables it to navigate uncharted routes without relying on pre-mapped data or expensive sensor suites.
Established in 2021, Vayu Robotics was founded by a team of engineers, technologists, and enterprise leaders with a wealth of business expertise in creating and commercializing innovative automotive sensing, autonomous vehicles, and robotics technology.
The company debuted a cutting-edge digital camera sensor in 2022, designed to enable its self-navigating inventory robots to move freely without relying on LiDAR sensors. Vayu Sense merges dense, low-cost CMOS picture sensors with advanced computational imaging and machine learning methods. The company asserts that its proprietary technology surpasses both traditional RGB cameras and LiDAR, yielding a cost-effective high-resolution robotic vision system capable of delivering accurate high-res depth perception, object detection, and reliable performance in challenging environments?
Vayu Robotics
Developed by a proprietary AI model for robotics autonomy, called Vayu Drive, this technology excels using both simulated and real-world data, eliminating the need for high-definition maps, localization expertise, or Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors – instead relying on the Sense vision system.
The company explained that it’s an end-to-end neural network, functioning similarly to large language models (LLMs), which process input tokens and output tokens. The entrance is multimodal, comprising picture tokens from cameras, instructional tokens outlining tasks assigned to the robot, and route tokens guiding its road-level navigation path?
Without this nuance in other large language models (LLMs), our model has developed a robust notion of “state” through continuous learning, refining its understanding with each new piece of data acquired. This enables large context windows without the typical slowdown associated with them. It’s engineered to operate seamlessly at a frame rate of 10 frames per second.
Vayu Robotics officially emerged from stealth mode in October last year, securing $12.7 million in seed funding from prominent investors including Lockheed Martin. The company is now introducing its inaugural robotics product. The One is engineered to navigate seamlessly through various environments, including roads, bike lanes, sidewalks, and indoor spaces, marking a groundbreaking innovation that combines AI-driven fashion and cost-effective passive sensors in a singular, world-first solution.
The four-wheeled electrical supply pod, standing 1 meter tall and measuring 1.8 meters by 0.67 meters in size, is designed to navigate through crowded areas with ease, moving at a pace of up to 32 kilometers per hour without posing an obstacle to visitors. The estimated maximum range of its battery pack reportedly spans between 60 and 70 miles, equivalent to approximately 112.6 kilometers.
Vayu Robotics
Upon reaching its designated drop-off point, the drone will gently touch down on the sidewalk or driveway, pause briefly, swing open its side panel, and retrieve the assigned package using its onboard robotic arm. According to the company, the product can store up to approximately 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of items within its storage compartment, with potential modifications enabling an increased capacity of up to 200 pounds.
A giant e-commerce player is currently evaluating The One for potential deployment, with a plan to introduce 2,500 robots first in San Ramon, California, before expanding to other US cities. Various business opportunities are poised to capitalize on this system’s potential, but Vayu aims to leverage its technologies in diverse robotic applications – currently collaborating with a prominent global robotics manufacturer to replace LiDAR sensors with Vayu’s sensing technology.
“Our software program is robotics-agnostic, enabling seamless integration with various types of components. We’ve successfully deployed it across multiple wheeled platforms.” By leveraging Vayu’s cutting-edge software capabilities, we anticipate being able to bring quadrupedal and bipedal robots to market in the near future, said co-founder Anand Gopalan. The video under has extra.
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