California-based Vayu Robotics this week announced the real-world deployment of an autonomous on-road delivery robot.

The robot, combining AI models with low-cost sensing, is being rolled out in the US with an e-commerce customer, in a move to slash the cost of e-commerce deliveries.

Vayu Robotics is venture-backed, with a team that previously worked at Lyft, Apple, Google and Facebook, and with experience working in autonomous technology programmes.

Consumers in the US increasingly rely on e-commerce platforms to deliver groceries, electronics, apparel and more, explains the company.

While the number of deliveries is skyrocketing – by 2027, 23% of American retail purchases are expected to take place online – cost per delivery remains high.

The company notes that traditional mobile robotics rely on costly light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors and software modules built to do one task at a time, leading to expensive hardware and fragile software unable to handle new scenarios.

“Vayu’s robot does the opposite. The company has combined a transformer-based mobility foundation model with a powerful passive sensor that, working together, eliminate the need for lidar.

“As a result, Vayu’s delivery robot operates autonomously without pre-mapping the roads it intends to drive on, and is capable of navigating inside stores, on city streets, and unloading packages on driveways or porches, carrying up to 100 lbs [45 kg] at under 20 mph [32 km/h].”

Vayu was co-founded by Anand Gopalan, the CEO who took lidar supplier Velodyne public in 2020, as well as Mahesh Krishnamurthi and Nitish Srivastava,  both from Apple’s Special Projects Group.

The trio says they realised that large-volume robotics applications, like robotics delivery, could only be unlocked by inventing a new technology stack that involved lower cost hardware and more robust software.

“The unique set of technologies we have developed at Vayu have allowed us to solve problems that have plagued delivery robots over the past decade, and to finally create a solution that can actually be deployed at scale, enabling the cheap transport of goods everywhere,” says CEO Gopalan.

Vayu’s delivery robots are already being debuted in real-world applications.

The company has signed a commercial agreement with a large e-commerce player to deploy 2 500 robots to enable ultrafast goods delivery, with similar commercial customers in the pipeline.

The team is also working with a global robotics manufacturer to replace lidar sensors with Vayu’s sensing technology for other robotic applications.

“Our software is robot form factor agnostic, and we have already deployed it across several wheeled form factors,” adds Gopalan.

“In the near future, Vayu's software technology will also enable the movement of quadrupedal and bipedal robots, allowing us to expand into those markets as well.”

Looking ahead, Vayu’s founders believe their “revolutionary low-cost robotics nervous system” can power a new wave of mobile robots in other use cases, too.

“Autonomous delivery robots are only the tip of the iceberg,” says Gopalan.