California-based Coco Robotics announced a pilot program in the Heights neighborhood last week, nearly a year after Uber Eats teamed with Avride for downtown robot delivery service.
“We’re super-excited to be there,” company co-founder and CEO Zach Rash told NJ Advance Media on Friday.
Coco Robotics said it has produced 1,000 robots — all named Coco — and made 500,000 deliveries in conjunction with 3,000 merchant partners since being founded in 2020.
Other locations served by the company include Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Jersey City is its first New Jersey location.
Coco weighs 100 pounds, has zero emissions and travels on sidewalks at speeds of up to 5 mph. It can reach 15 mph in bicycle lanes but Rash said the company will not be using the lanes in Jersey City.
The robot uses AI self-driving features aided by remote human operators and has 90 liters of insulated storage space. That’s enough for up to four full grocery bags or six extra-large boxes of pizza, according to the company.
Coco is not yet making deliveries in the Heights, a neighborhood with around 60,000 residents and plenty of restaurants and bars.
Residents are already being introduced to Coco. One of the robots was roaming near Pershing Field Park on Friday morning in order to map the area and identify the most efficient routes.
Coco Robotics credited former Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop and his administration with accommodating the pilot program.
“They were incredibly supportive of the technology,” Rash said.
Fulop also supported the downtown robot delivery program involving Uber Eats and Avride. He left office Wednesday after declining to seek a fourth term and starts Tuesday as president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City.
Coco Robotics provided a statement from Fulop in which the ex-mayor described autonomous delivery as “a natural evolution of how cities can support local business.”
Robot delivery service has drawn some criticism elsewhere, most notably in Chicago, where Coco Robotics is one of at least two service providers authorized under a pilot program. A petition calling for the program to be halted over safety and other concerns was launched last fall.
Carl Hansen, vice president of government relations for Coco Robotics, said the company’s robots are “super-safe.”
“That said, it’s operating out in the real world. Things are going to go wrong but the great thing is, if something goes wrong, it’s not a car,” Hansen said.
Asked how his company chose Jersey City, Rash said his first restaurant customer in Santa Monica had started in Hoboken and recommended the region. The company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Brad Squicciarini, is a New Jersey native, he said.
Rash and Squicciarini met at UCLA, where they began discussing the concept that became their company. They graduated in 2019, one year before launching Coco Robotics.
“When we were starting the company, we were wondering what to call it. We looked up a list of cute dog names on Google. Number one was Coco, and we go, ok, perfect, done,” Rash said.
“We just wanted it to feel like a member of your community, not some piece of technology. It really is there to serve the community, to serve the merchants,” Rash said.
Coco has front, rear, left and right cameras with LiDAR full 360-degree perception. Cameras provide visual details like signs and lane marking, while LiDAR delivers accurate depth sensing and a real-time, three-dimensional view, according to the company.
Rash said that no personal information is stored and that faces and license plates are blurred.
“The only data we share is about sidewalk conditions,” Hansen said.
Rash said the customer always has the option of requesting a person instead of a robot.
Businesses, though, would appear to have an incentive in sending out a robot rather than a person.
“If we’re working with them directly then there’s a fee per delivery that they pay that’s meaningfully less than what it would cost for a human delivery,” Rash said.
Human delivery drivers do have their advantages. For example, Coco will not venture up to the sixth floor of an apartment building.
“Very rarely do we go into the buildings. Typically, we’ll meet you at the closest possible point,” Rash said.
Rash said he expects that Coco will begin making deliveries within the next few weeks.
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