Robot Dreams Become Reality in California

Pittsburgh, Boston, and Colorado’s Boulder Valley may be the new centers for developing the U.S. robotics industry. Still, it seems that Californian consumers are the primary test market for the new wave of robotic applications.

Not only can San Franciscans order autonomous taxis as part of initial trials approved for General Motors’ Cruise venture and Google sister company Waymo, but some of them are having their nails painted by robots, speaking with robotic concierges at hotels, and having parcels delivered to their homes and offices by a robot.

Nuro, a leader in autonomous delivery vehicles, is kicking off a new service in California in partnership with 7-Eleven. The company will deliver convenience store products to customers in its autonomous Toyota Prius vehicles, which will include a safety driver behind the wheel, before eventually shifting over to its fully driverless R2 delivery vehicles.

Robotic pampering

It might seem slightly obscure, but the nail-painting robots from San Francisco startup Clockwork could herald the beginning of a generation of consumer servicing robots, a step up from the electrical appliances that people have been using in their homes for close to a century.

Clockwork was created by former Nvidia and DropBox engineer Renuka Apte and co-founder Aaron Feldstein in 2018, and the company currently has less than ten employees. So it’s a classic startup existing on founders' funds and the USD3.2 million in seed capital raised from Initialized Capital, created by Reddit funder Alexis Ohanian. A second funding round has brought this to USD7 million.

Last October, Clockwork embarked on a seven-month pop up store called "The Lab" in San Francisco, giving 10-minute manicures at a pop-up location to women — and an increasing number of men — who want their nails touched up but can’t afford the money or time for an hour-long spa session.

“My dream would be to walk into a comfy booth and walk out with all my services done”

With the concept trialed, and algorithms trained up, the Clockwork machines are now off to New York to serve customers in Rockefeller Plaza and into retail stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Our objective is convenience and being where our customer already is, rather than the sit-down experience,” Apte told the San Francisco Business Times in a recent interview.

“These machines have been sort of software first — that’s what has all the smarts — so it allows us to iterate on the machine a lot faster than typical with hardware.”

The interest has been from retailers and residential developers who want to offer something different and convenient, in-store or in apartment building lounges and common areas. Where once you might have seen machines cleaning shoes, soon you might see robots delivering quick manicures for busy people as they snatch a chunk of time out of their day for grooming.

Apte calls the process a “minicure” rather than a manicure, and the company plans to ramp up production at scale later this year and add applications such as painting topcoats, cutting, or shaping.

“My dream would be to walk into a comfy booth and walk out with all my services done,” Apte told the Business Times.

“There are so many commonalities between robotic applications; then once you’ve gotten the computer vision and the AI and the calibration piece, you’re really able to unlock a lot of other services.”

New milestone

Still, in San Francisco, consumers can receive their parcels from a new fleet of robots created by Serve Robotics, a startup spun off from Uber-owned Postmates last year.

Serve has developed a fleet of robots that it says can deliver with no human involvement. They have achieved SAE Level 4 autonomy — out of a possible 6 levels, which means the devices can operate on their own in “certain areas and under certain conditions.” SAE Levels range from 0 to 5, with Level 5 being the highest with no human intervention needed.

This compares with other sidewalk delivery devices – or vehicles – from the likes of Kiwibot, and Coco, all at Level 3, while Tesla has an Autopilot feature currently classed at Level 2.

Another leader is Starship Technologies, which has had robots operating at Level 4 since 2018 in cities and campuses, doing multiple deliveries.

Serve Robotics co-founder and chief executive Ali Kashani said autonomous delivery “further enhances public safety by significantly reducing the potential for human error.”

“This technical and commercial milestone is an achievement for the entire autonomous vehicle industry and accelerates our mission to make delivery more accessible and sustainable,” Kashani said.

The robots combine software and hardware using Lidar and ultrasonic sensors, cameras, and Nvidia’s Jetson platform operating system.

Redundant sensors and cameras are also built into the system, the idea being to create an additional layer of protection in the event of any malfunctions.

When the robot is assigned to an area where Level 4 is enabled, the remote video feed turns off, and the root continues under autonomous navigation, although the video is turned back on when crossing intersections. If anything unexpected is encountered, they can call for human assistance.

Beginning in San Francisco, Serve is also developing Level 4 capabilities in Los Angeles, suggesting that 2022 could be the year of the consumer robot in California.

And as the rest of the world knows, trends that begin in California are readily exported to the rest of the world.

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/Igor Kutyaev