Picture a little red wagon with a large picnic cooler on top. Now smooth out the lines, give the cooler’s surfaces banks of LED lights, give the wagon some extra wheels and a sophisticated suspension undercarriage, an operating system with satellite tracking, 12 cameras, and a brain that knows how to find its way around the neighborhood, and you can start to imagine Carbon Origins’ new food delivery robot, Skippy.
Carbon Origins is a new, local venture-financed robotics company headquartered on Marshall Street NE within the Twin Ignition Startup Garage space. Its founder and CEO, Amogha Srirangarajan, sees the possibility of a future without the kind of human work that existed for millennia. His phrase, “Make robots commonplace,” implies that humans can and should be freed up from menial tasks to do “whatever we want, while robots take care of the rest.”
The Indian-born Srirangarajan said he was fascinated by robots as a young boy, once even having a robot-themed birthday party. He moved to the U.S. when he was 18 and to California after getting his engineering degree from Case Western University in Ohio. After starting Carbon Origins in the Bay Area, he moved to St. Paul to participate in the Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator, a program focused on the future of food and agriculture. And the company presented their first alpha robot in the St. Paul skyways.
Srirangarajan says that with all the advances in shipping and distribution, the most difficult and costly part of the chain is “last-mile delivery.” As deliveries of just about anything get closer to their destination, the efficiency of workers and the amount of goods delivered is diminished. So why not substitute robots for humans at this point?
Carbon Origins designs and manufactures the robots here in Minnesota; there are six at the moment, of which three are deployed. Skippy takes items for delivery that last mile (or more) semi-autonomously. Guided by a combination of cell phone apps and virtual reality headsets on “Skipsters,” private contractors who can work from virtually anywhere, a Skippy will fetch food, deliver it, and wait for the next order to come from a growing network of restaurants, coffee shops and more. The business plan is for Carbon Origins to retain ownership of the robots and provide the restaurants and the communities “an equitable, safe, and affordable delivery solution.”
To demonstrate Skippy’s prowess, a staff member ordered a dessert from Fletcher’s Ice Cream store, a few blocks north on Marshall. Six robot-eye views came up on a large screen as the Skippy glided over rough sidewalk, slid over curbs, stopped for traffic, and pulled right up to Fletcher’s door. A button on a phone app unlocked the lid, the dessert was placed inside, and Skippy did a 180 and made its way back, about 20% faster than an average human’s walking speed.
Most of the company’s developers have engineering or technical degrees (a couple of them are interns finishing up school). Carbon Origins is hiring, and Srirangarajan’s first question to job applicants is “What have you worked on before this?”
How will the company make money? It charges a 15% service fee to the consumer and a 15% commission fee to the restaurant. Srirangarajan says they believe in “an equitable platform that is affordable to everyone in the community,” noting that other delivery services charge 30% or more to both consumers and restaurants. The LED lights can feature changeable advertising, and Carbon Origins will use the data collected from the robot to provide actionable information to cities such as sidewalk scores, parking, potholes and maintenance needs. “We will also use this data in the future to enhance the street-view/sidewalk view map experience for the public.”
For now, the company’s goal is to ramp up both robot production and the number of restaurants and other businesses who can see those high-tech little wagons in their future.
Below: Two “Skippy” robots outside Carbon Origins on Marshall Street. One of the company’s testing and assembly areas. (Photos by Mark Peterson)