Following its launch of autonomous food delivery in Miami And Fairfax, VirginiaUber Eats will soon offer the same robotic service in Japan – its first outside the United States. He collaborates again with the startup Google Alum Cartkenwith local compliance assistance from Mitsubishi Electric, to bring a fleet of Model C curbside delivery robots to select areas of Tokyo in March. Shintaro Nakagawa, CEO of Uber Eats Japan, says the autonomous delivery service will solve the problem of local labor shortages, while complementing existing human delivery methods “by bicycle, by motorbike, with goods light and on foot.
Cartken's six-wheel Model C uses six cameras and advanced AI models for autonomous driving and obstacle detection, and remote control mode is available when needed. With advice from Mitsubishi, the robot was modified to meet local needs in Japan. For one, its speed is capped at 5.4 km/h or around 3.36 mph depending on local regulations, which is much slower than the 6 mph top speed it's actually capable of. Cargo capacity has also been reduced from 1.5 cubic feet to approximately 0.95 cubic feet (27 liters), likely due to the additional thermal insulation of the compartment. Uber Eats adds that for privacy reasons, people's faces are automatically hidden in the images captured by the robots.
Although this is the beginning of Uber Eats' robotic delivery in Japan, Cartken is already present there thanks to Mitsubishi. Since early 2022, the duo has been working with Starbucks, local e-commerce giant Rakuten and supermarket chain Seiyu in parts of Japan. In the United States, Cartken has also partnered with Grubhub to provide autonomous food delivery service on college campuses, including Ohio State University and the University of Arizona.
Although Uber Eats has not yet indicated which restaurants in Tokyo will use its robotic delivery service, it should have no problem seeking a partnership given Cartken's prior local experience. That said, I highly doubt the two men would take the risk of testing their robots on a crowd of drunks in Shibuya.