Much has been made about a consumer society where deliveries of packages or groceries to consumers went from 2 weeks to 2 days to now 2 hours. And for businesses, rapid and just-in-time deliveries from suppliers give new meaning to the supply chain—factories and warehouses can maintain less inventory, reducing holding costs and reducing the risk of inventory becoming obsolete. As the pandemic accelerated the adoption of delivery as a modality, the case for autonomous technologies—autonomous cars and trucks, sidewalk robots and pods, drones—to cut merchant costs and to close the gap between rising demand and labor shortage is even greater.
In a similar way, much has been made about building and investing in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. Between OEMs, big tech, startups, tier 1 and 2 suppliers, hundreds of companies have a stake somewhere between the hardware and software stacks that enable self-driving cars. However, what hasn’t been explored deeply is the delivery application that sits on top of the AV stack and is highly customized for the consumers and operators of delivery services. (Think of how Uber is the application that sits on top of the Toyota Camry platform and is highly customized for the ride-hailing use case). This is where Udelv comes to play.
Mobitas recently became an advisor and investor of Udelv, a California-based autonomous delivery platform for last- and middle-mile deliveries. The challenges that Udelv is aiming to solve are that in the world of deliveries today…
Merchants delivering goods to their B2C or B2B customers need to balance increasingly demanding customers’ needs and expectations with available technologies and operational processes, and they need to do so in a cost-effective way.
Getting the right product in the hands of customers at the right location and at the right time have been getting increasingly complex due to:
Constant expansion of products that now could be delivered (packages, flowers, frozen foods, prescription drugs, dry cleaning)
The storage and handling requirements associated with each type of product
The need to ensure an accurate ETA but managing customer’s expectations on the fly if needed, and
Various ways and preferences which the customer will retrieve products from the AVs (from the curb? In the driveway? At the dock?)
These delivery-specific challenges are not solved through pure autonomous vehicle driving technology—there’s a need to dig deeper and develop highly customized solutions, and this need opens up the door for innovation.
Udelv is aiming to become the delivery application for merchants, with its core platform composed of:
An autonomous vehicle in the shape of a practical, mid-sized cargo van. Udelv has piloted with Toyota Siennas and Ford Transits models.
Robotic cargo system (uPod), the cargo space with modular shelving space that adapts to load sizes, maximizing volumetric efficiency and decreasing the time required to load and unload the vehicles.
Logistics & planning system for accepting and aggregating loads, route planning, and estimating ETAs based on a variety of internal and external factors (vehicle position, speed, traffic, customer interception time).
Teleoperations system that supervises the AV and lets a human take control of the vehicle remotely in unique situations.
Mobile services that allow merchants and consumers to interface with their products and track delivery status.
[Photo: Udelv]
What we believe Udelv has done very well is identifying use cases where this technology can enable autonomous delivery NOW instead of later. The team has been working with merchants to deliver goods on geofenced, fixed, frequent, and repeatable routes. These merchants may be B2B organizations (e.g. automotive parts distributor) that currently have a fleet of 4 trucks and 4 drivers, who make the same route 8 times per day. These types of routes are the lowest-hanging fruit for autonomous deliveries as they are structured, practical, and have a clear cost-reduction value proposition. Udelv has deployed its application quickly through several partnerships which included Walmart, XL Parts, OnTrac, the United States Air Force, among others and are already generating revenue since its founding four years ago.
From here, the applications and logistics will get more complex, more unstructured, with more fickle customers, and we’re excited to see the Udelv team and fleet of AVs learn, optimize, and expand into new territories!
Very interesting piece. Curious to understand where the AV stack ends and the delivery application begins? Excited for the future of AV!