Coco Robotics — a startup offering a bunch of last-mile delivery bots — wants to squeeze more insights from the five years worth of data its robots have gathered. The AI lab that came to be, with University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Bolei Zhou at the helm.
Coco Robotics, which announced the news Tuesday, said Zhou has also come aboard the Los Angeles-based startup as chief AI scientist.
That same year, when the company first launched, its bots were assisted by teleoperators maneuvering through obstacles along the delivery path. Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco Robotics, tells Mid Breaker the company has always had its eye on operating its last-mile delivery robots completely autonomously to lower the total cost of delivery. At this point, Rash said that the company has enough data to allow for deeper exploration visiting automation.
Rash said, “We have millions of miles of data collected under the most complex urban environments you can imagine and that data is highly valuable for training any type of useful and robust real world AI systems. We have enough data scale at this point, I think, that we can really start to accelerate a lot of the research on physical AI that is going on around us.
Given the way Zhou has gone about trying to bring the results up, any decision to tap him for the job was a “no brainer,” according to Rash. According to Rash, Zhou’s research has centered around micromobility, not full-scale vehicles, near any of the computer vision and robotics work happening at the Institute.
Zhou was also already working with Coco Robotics, too. Rash and his co-founder Brad Squicciarin are both UCLA alums, and the pair even donated one of their bots to the UCLA research labe.
Rash said: Zhou is one of the foremost researchers in the world on things like robot navigation, reinforcement learning and much of the technology and research areas that are most relevant for us. He has been extremely successful at attracting some of the best researchers in the world that he has worked with before to come to Coco and help speed things along on our side,” said Barrera.
The new lab is distinct from Coco Robotics’ previously announced collaboration with OpenAI, in which the robotics startup can utilize OpenAI’s models while the AI research lab receives access to data collected by the startup’s robot.
But for now, Coco Robotics will be keeping the information and research gleaned from the lab to itself The data, which the company does not plan to sell to its peers, Rash said.
Instead, it will go toward the company enhancing its automation and efficiency, mostly as it relates to the local models its robots run on. When possible, Rash says they will also publish their research for the cities where they operate, in order to address barriers and infrastructure that slow down their bots.
Rash said that ‘success for this lab really looks at us providing a better service at a very low cost.’ How can we reduce our costs? How do we get this into the hands of businesses and customers at a far cheaper cost? That 182 million is going to do a ton of growth in this ecosystem I believe.
