A modern housing estate, next to the River Thames in East London, is the site of a testing ground for the future of home deliveries. For a 10-day period this month, those who live in the housing estate are getting groceries from what's best described as a self-driving milk float.
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Dubbed CargoPod, the driverless car is equipped with stereo cameras and LiDAR sensors that map the world around it. Developed using Oxbotica's Selenium technology and Ocado's Smart Platform, the vehicle is completing around 100 deliveries during the trial.
During the test at the Woolwich estate, CargoPod has been carrying groceries around a 3km route and stores goods in a eight boxes that fit inside the rear of the vehicle. In total, it is able to carry 128kg.
"What we see here is a very different environment to what we see on the roads," Graeme Smith, the chief executive of Oxbotica tells WIRED as the vehicle is being demoed on a drizzly London day earlier this week. "Part of the learnings we're getting from the whole trial is finding out how these vehicles interact with pedestrians and cyclists".
The roads around the estate are generally wide and the vehicle has to navigate its way along paths with pedestrians and other street "furniture". One of the biggest obstacles faced by the vehicle during its rounds has been the gated communities. To navigate this during the trial, either the delivery person or test engineer who have been riding in the vehicles have had to get out and press a button to open the gates. If developed further, the two so-called "safety humans" will be removed from CargoPod.
"We see this as adding another option to the last-mile mix," Paul Clarke, chief technology officer at Ocado tells WIRED. The company has consistently developed new technologies, with its automated factory moving 8,000 crates at any one time.
"Maybe you're getting back at three o'clock in the morning and suddenly deciding you want a short lead time order brought to you and you're prepared to go to the curb to pick it up," Clarke says of the CargoPod.
During the trial, the delivery person inside the vehicle has been taking shopping to customers and those people have been able to select from a number of free gift hampers to be delivered. The shopping has then been loaded with the orders at a hub location with the fleet management software planning the route for the vehicle.
The test isn't the first autonomous vehicle trial to hit the roads of South London and Greenwich. Driverless shuttles are also being used in the area. Both of these tests are part of the https://gateway-project.org.uk/GATEway Project. Separately, Starship Technologies have been using small pods to move shopping around the area.
"The movement of freight is at least as important as the movement of people in a city," Nick Reed, the technical lead for the GATEway Project, tells WIRED. He also added he believes the Oxbotica and Ocado vehicles are appropriate for the environment.
The vehicles are limited to 5mph because of the pedestrianised areas they are travelling but this potentially shows how autonomous vehicles can be adapted for specific tasks and situations. "In contrast to a passenger vehicle where we're going 70 miles per hour, we don't need sensors that are quite as long range," Oxbotica's Smith explains.
"We can use lower spec sensors and we don't need to process as fast as we're not moving as fast," he continues. "In this type of lower-speed, less complex environment, maybe there is a lower-cost system out there".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
