Coco Robotics, a startup known for its fleet of last-mile delivery bots, is looking to learn more from five years of data collected by its robots. The answer is a physical AI lab directed by Professor Bolei Zhou at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
In an announcement Tuesday, Coco Robotics said Chou will also join the Los Angeles-based startup as chief AI scientist.
When the company started in 2020, it used a remote operator to help the bot overcome obstacles on delivery routes. Coco Robotics co-founder and CEO Zach Rash told TechCrunch that the company’s goal has always been to operate last-mile delivery robots autonomously to reduce overall delivery costs. Currently, the company has collected enough data to dig deeper into automation, Rush said.
“We have millions of miles of data collected in the most complex urban environments possible, and that data is critical to training all kinds of useful and reliable real-world AI systems,” Rush said. “We think we’re at a point now where we have enough data scale that we can really start to accelerate a lot of the research that’s being done around physical AI.”
The decision to select Chou to lead the effort was “a no-brainer,” Rush said. Chou’s research in computer vision and robotics focuses primarily on micromobility rather than full-scale vehicles, Rush said.
Coco Robotics was also already working with Zhou. Rush and his co-founder Brad Scucciarini are both UCLA alumni, and they even donated one of their bots to the school’s lab.
“(Zhou) is one of the world’s leading researchers in robotic navigation, reinforcement learning, and many other technologies and research areas that are very relevant to us,” Rush said. “He already has a great ability to bring some of the world-class researchers he has worked with to come here and help accelerate things on our side.”
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The new lab is separate from the robotics startup’s collaboration with OpenAI, which will allow Coco Robotics to use OpenAI’s models while giving the AI lab access to data collected by the company’s robots.
Coco Robotics currently plans to use the information and research collected from the laboratory for its own purposes. Rush said the company has no plans to sell data to other companies in the industry.
Rather, the company is used to improve automation and efficiency, and is primarily concerned with local models in which robots operate. Rush also said the company plans to share its findings with the cities in which it operates, as needed, to fix roadblocks and infrastructure that slow down the bot.
“The success of this lab depends on our ability to provide high-quality service at very low prices,” Rush said. “How can we bring the cost down? How can we make this more affordable for businesses and customers? I think that’s going to drive a lot of growth for this ecosystem.”
