Cartken deploys robots as a service for deliveries

There’s a savvy new robot on the sidewalks, and it’s delivering coffee, food, and a taste of fun.

The bot is attracting interest from Oakland, California startup Cartken. The company, founded in 2019, quickly deployed robots for a handful of customer applications, including Starbucks and Grubhub deliveries.

Cartken CEO Chris Bersch said he and co-founders Jonas Witt, Jake Stelman and Anjali Jindal Naik were excited about the prospect of robots because of the technology’s availability and affordability. The four Google alumni decided the time was right to take the plunge and start a business together.

“What we saw was a technological inflection point where we could run small autonomous vehicles on the street,” Bersch said. “Because it doesn’t make sense to build a $20,000 robot that can deliver burritos.”

Cartken is part of a wave of NVIDIA Jetson-enabled autonomous mobile robot (AMR) startups advancing into agtech, manufacturing, retail, and last-mile delivery.

New and established businesses are looking for business efficiencies as well as workforce support amid ongoing shortages in the post-COVID era, which is driving market demand.

According to ABI Research, last mile robotic delivery revenues are expected to grow more than 9-fold to $670 million in 2030, from $70 million in 2022.

Jetson pilots robots as a service

Cartken offers robots as a service (RaaS) to customers in a pay-as-you-go model. In this way, as a white-label technology provider, Cartken allows companies to customize robots according to their particular brand appearance and specific application functionalities.

He’s part of a growing cohort of companies riding the RaaS wave, with ambitions as far reaching as on-demand remote museum tours on autonomous industrial lawn mowers.

Much of this is made possible by powerful NVIDIA Jetson on-board computer modules, which can handle a multitude of sensors and cameras.

“Cartken chose Jetson’s industry-leading AI platform because it provides the superior embedded computing performance needed to run Cartken’s advanced AI algorithms. Additionally, the low power consumption allows Cartken’s robots to run all day on a single battery charge,” said Bersch.

The company relies on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin to run six cameras that aid in mapping and navigation as well as wheel odometry to measure its physical distance of movement.

Leveraging Jetson, Cartken’s robots perform simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM, to automatically create maps of their surroundings for navigation. “They’re essentially Level 4 autonomy — they’re visual processing-based, so we can map an entire area,” Bersch said.

“The good thing about our navigation is that it works both indoors and outdoors, so GPS is optional – we can locate based on purely visual characteristics,” he said. .

Cartken is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that helps startups with GPU technologies, software, and business development support.

Serving Grubhub and Starbucks

Cartken robots provide Grubhub deliveries to Arizona and Ohio State University. Grubhub users can order on the app as they normally would and get a tracking link to track their order’s progress. They are told that their delivery will be by a robot and can use the app to unlock the robot’s lid to grab the food and go.

Some might wonder if the delivery charges for such entertaining delivery technology are the same. “I believe it’s the same, but you don’t have to tip,” Bersch said with a smile.

Mitsubishi Electric is a distributor of Cartken in Japan. It relies on Cartken’s robots for deployments at AEON malls in Tokoname and Toki for Starbucks coffee and food deliveries.

The companies are also testing a “smart city” concept for outdoor deliveries of Starbucks products to nearby parks, apartments and homes. Additionally, Mitsubishi, Cartken and others are working on deliveries inside a multi-level office building.

Looking ahead, the CEO of Cartken says the next big challenge is to scale up robot manufacturing to keep pace with orders. It has strong demand from partners including Grubhub, Mitsubishi and UK delivery company DPD.

Cartken announced in September a partnership with Magna International, a world leader in automotive supplies, to help expand the manufacturing of its robots. The agreement provides for the production of thousands of AMRs as well as the development of additional robot models for different use cases.