Kroger Expands Autonomous Vehicle Delivery

Grocery giant Kroger has expanded a partnership agreement with the robotic firm Nuro, which will work to expand the autonomous delivery service.

Previously, this service has already been used in Scottsdale, Arizona. Excellent results convinced Kroger to expand and implement it also in Houston, Texas.

Nuro robotic company has existed since 2016. Its products are an autonomous electric commercial vehicle R1, designed to carry small loads on public roads. For the first time about the negotiations with Nuro Kroger became known in August 2018. Initially, Prius self-propelled hybrids were used for delivery, in which the operator was present as a safety net. It has been stated that over the past month’s thousands of deliveries were made using autonomous cars, which showed their reliability. In this case, not only was the goods delivered, but the automatic control system was also debugged, which is used in the Nuro R1. However, it should be noted that R1 is still controlled by the operators, just remotely.

The delivery scheme is as follows – the consumer makes a purchase on the Internet, after which the order is loaded on R1 and delivered to the specified address. To open the trunk, the customer must enter the code that he previously receives on the mobile application. Now the latest achievements of civilization will be able to take advantage of the inhabitants of Houston.

Also earlier this month, Starship Technologies, a company specializing in autonomous delivery systems, announced that it had already completed 50,000 commercial shipments using its designs. The robot of the company can deliver within a radius of 5 km, carrying a variety of goods – from parcels to food. Offline delivery is gradually becoming commonplace.