Uber on Tuesday announced a partnership between robotics company Cartken and Japanese industrial titan Mitsubishi Electric to launch autonomous sidewalk robots, which will begin delivering Eats orders in parts of Tokyo starting next month.
Japan will be the first international market to have autonomous delivery available on the Uber Eats platform. However, the country is no stranger to adopting robot helpers in the hospitality sector, and many popular restaurant chains have been using them for years.
Cartken's Model C robots will deliver food and navigate Tokyo's sidewalks. Operations will be overseen by Mitsubishi Electric as part of the partnership.
They use AI and computer vision technologies to navigate their environments.
Robots that cross sidewalks are designed to avoid obstacles, give way to pedestrians and stop at traffic lights. They travel at approximately the same speed as an adult walking and are equipped with a cargo compartment designed to keep food at a suitable temperature during transport.
Uber Eats and Cartken have first partnered to launch autonomous robot delivery services in parts of Miami in 2022, and expanded robot delivery for Fairfax, Virginia, last year.
Japan, which was recently displaced by Germany as the world's third-largest economy, has been struggling for years with an aging population and a shrinking workforce, putting enormous pressure on its logistics infrastructure.
Shoji Tanaka, senior general manager of the Advanced Applications Development Center, Development Division of Mitsubishi Electric, said in a statement that robot delivery services “are considered an effective countermeasure to the logistics crisis that will become more serious in the future.” .
He said Mitsubishi has been working with Cartken to “answer these social issues.”
“We hope this newly announced initiative will serve as a catalyst for the spread of robot delivery services in Japan,” Tanaka added. “In the future, we will work with factory buildings and infrastructure, one of our strengths, so that autonomous robots will be able to make deliveries within various facilities,” said Tanaka.
Source: CNN Brasil
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