Coco Robotics, a startup known for its fleet of last-mile delivery bots, is looking to get more information out of the five years’ worth of data its robots have collected. Its answer is a physical AI lab with University of California Los Angeles professor Bolei Zhou at the helm.
Coco Robotics made the announcement Tuesday and said Zhou has also joined the Los Angeles-based startup as chief AI scientist. When the company launched in 2020, it used teleoperators to help the bots navigate obstacles on their delivery routes. Coco Robotics co-founder and CEO Zach Rash stated the company’s goal has always been to operate its last-mile delivery robots autonomously to cut the overall costs of delivery. Now, Rash said the company has collected enough data to dive deeper into automation.
Rash explained that the company has millions of miles of data collected in the most complicated urban settings possible, and that data is incredibly important for training any sort of useful and reliable real world AI systems. He said they are now at the point where they have sufficient data scale to start really accelerating a lot of the research happening around physical AI.
The decision to tap Zhou to lead the effort was described by Rash as a no brainer. Zhou’s research around computer vision and robotics has largely focused on micromobility, as opposed to full-scale vehicles. Coco Robotics was already collaborating with Zhou. Both Rash and his co-founder Brad Squicciarini are UCLA alums and have even donated one of their bots to the school’s research lab.
Rash said Zhou is one of the leading researchers in the whole world on robot navigation, reinforcement learning, and a lot of the technologies and areas of research that are highly relevant for the company. He added that Zhou has been already very capable of recruiting some of the top researchers in the world to come join Coco and help accelerate things.
This new research lab is separate from the collaboration the robotics startup has with OpenAI, which allows Coco Robotics to use OpenAI’s models while the AI research lab gets access to the company’s robot-collected data.
Coco Robotics plans to use the information and research it gathers from the lab for its own purposes for now. Rash said the company does not have plans to sell the data to its peers. Rather, it will be used for the company to improve its automation and efficiency, which will mainly pertain to the local models its robots run on.
Rash said they also plan to share their research findings with the cities they operate in when applicable, to help fix obstacles and infrastructure that slows their bots down. He stated that success for this lab really looks at offering a higher-quality service at an extremely low price. The focus is on how to get costs lower and make the service much more affordable for businesses and customers, which he believes will create a tremendous amount of growth in this ecosystem.