Cars Gatik constant delivery routes of 10 miles. The company’s co-founders saw the need to connect warehouses and microprocessing centers to retail outlets and distribution centers.
Today, autonomous driving generation for freight transport is gaining ground, with corporations such as Waymo and Aurora Innovation accelerating their efforts through truck-centric startups such as TuSimple, Plus.ai, Ike, Kodiak Robotics and Embark. And last-kilometre delivery robots are proliferating, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Everything has legs,” said Richard Bishop, head of automated driving strategy at Bishop Consulting. If you can use the technology, then the business case is clear. »
Factories manufacture products that pass by truck and operate to warehouses or distribution centers. There, they are taken care of and sent to the shops, where shoppers buy them and take them home.
Gatik worked with Walmart on its “mid-mile” solution for automatic money trucks to navigate undeniable routes between regional workshops and outlets.
Kiwibot operates partially automated cars that offer home delivery as an option for in-person purchases or trucks driven by people. A new implementation in San Jose, California, allows robots to pass through sidewalks for greater service and operations.
But three years ago, at a time when the promise of robotaxis dominated discussions about autonomous driving, the role of the underlying generation in logistics was less obvious. Narang and his co-founders, chief engineer Apeksha Kumavat and chief technology officer Arjun Narang, who is Gautam Narang’s brother, saw a window into the market as stores built distribution centers closer to their end consumers as they took shape finishes in collecting and delivering online groceries. . This forecast has paid off. Late last month, Gatik celebrated the first anniversary of its partnership with Walmart, in which it deploys a variety of autonomous cars to help the retail giant move products to Bentonville, Ark., where it is headquartered.
Elsewhere, Gatik has cars on the road in Palo Alto and Toronto. He says he works with other Fortune 500 corporations and has traveled more than 50,000 autonomous and revenue-generating miles, with a driving force for human protection still on board. Narang says COVID-19 has led to a 30 to 35% line-up and more partnerships will be signed within a few months.
“These are short-term pilot projects,” Narang said. “These are multiannual agreements with a contract price of several million.”
To date, the company has raised $4.5 million in funds. The financiers come with Trucks Venture Capital and Fontinalis Partners, which is the venture capital fund created through Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., for next-generation mobility companies.
“We don’t mind solving complicated problems in the area of autonomy. Array… What we care about is introducing as many limitations as we can. Gautam Narang, CEO, Gatik
At the heart of Gatik’s expansion is the company’s strategy of focusing on constant and repeatable delivery routes approximately 10 miles long, although this can increase up to 30 miles. Vehicles use the right lane as occasionally as you can imagine and make as many right turns as imaginable to maximize protection and power and, above all, avoid more confusing manoeuvres, such as unprotected left turns.
Such restrictions may disturb human passengers, but they have little effect on a logistics operation.
“We have the luxury and merit of opting for our own routes, and that’s not imaginable if you have other people on board,” narang, a former visiting fellow at the Honda Research Institute near Tokyo and a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, said. . “We don’t have to worry about lane settings or unprotected left turn resolution. We don’t care, as long as the goods are transported from the pick-up locations to the delivery locations.”
Because Gatik understands its routes so well, and the potential obstacles along them, its contingency plans come with designated preprogramming locations where cars can proccasion in case of unforeseen problems.
In addition, Narang says that software engineers can split the driving task into smaller deep neural networks that handle quick turns or traffic intersections. By designing a formula based on learning in small segments, Says Narang, Gatik can achieve a higher point of functionality with minimal inputs of knowledge.
Gatik cars vary in length, from small Ford Transit Connect commercial vans to Class 6 pickup trucks, and cars can travel up to 400 miles depending on the day between hubs and stores.
Just as Gatik has married retailers, he plans to marry automakers to build trucks where Gatik’s autonomous driving formula can be seamlessly integrated, which will likely come with hybrid and electric models.
Few other people expect autonomous driving generation to be able to drive on the road unprotected in the short term. In a July report, global generation consultantic Gartner said automated cars were more than 10 years away from entering 20% of the market. But with established routes, cars and limited complications, Narang believes Gatik is closer than many think.
“It’s the fruit at your fingertips,” he says. “We can point to this in the short term and scale it up.”
Bishop agrees.
“You’re simplifying your globalization by not doing B2C,” he said. “Then you have regularity when making plans in terms of origin and destination issues that one door at a time. They decrease complexity and that tells me “faster marketing.”
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