Amazon has bought Rivr, a Swiss robotics startup building four-legged, wheeled robots designed to walk packages from a delivery van to a customer’s front door. The acquisition was confirmed this week in a notice sent to Amazon’s third-party delivery contractors. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Rivr, previously known as Swiss-Mile, builds machines that cross the gap between wheeled robots and walking ones. The robot rolls on wheels for speed across flat ground, then uses its four legs to handle kerbs, stairs and uneven paths. These are exactly the sort of obstacles that have kept sidewalk delivery bots stuck in pilot programs for years. Amazon had already backed the company through its $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund and alongside Bezos Expeditions in a $22 million seed round last March.
The stated target is not a full robot replacement for human couriers. It is the final ten meters. In its notice to delivery partners, Amazon framed the technology as something that would work “alongside” drivers and help “improve safety outcomes and the overall customer experience, particularly in the last steps of the delivery process.” This is the part of the route where injuries happen, as drivers carry heavy parcels up icy steps, through poorly lit apartment complexes, or over the kind of cluttered paths that no amount of route optimization can smooth out.
The last mile is also the most expensive stretch of any delivery. Amazon leans on a network of thousands of third-party contractors to handle it, and the company has spent more than a decade pouring money into automation elsewhere in its operations. Inside its warehouses, Amazon Robotics now runs more than a million robots. Getting machines out of the warehouse and onto customers’ doormats has proven a much harder problem.
Rivr’s hardware gives Amazon a new angle on it. “We are in the early stages of this journey,” the company told partners, adding that delivery associates would be asked to field test the robots and feedback on how to scale the technology.
The deal lands as Jeff Bezos is reportedly in early talks to raise as much as $100 billion for a separate fund aimed at buying manufacturing businesses and automating them with AI. Logistics, clearly, is still where the Amazon playbook starts.
Article Source: Rivr
Image source by Anirudh on Unsplash
