Kiwi Campus, commonly referred to as Kiwi, is a

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

n-owned

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

providing food deliveries in California, United States, using largely autonomous robots called Kiwibots. Started in 2017 at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, the company also delivers to parts of the city of

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, on the

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campus in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

, and in San Jose.

Operations

Kiwi uses three kinds of robots: one to collect prepared orders from the restaurant, a semi-autonomous tricycle in which orders are sorted and taken most of the way to the delivery point, and a small four-wheeled "Kiwibot", which can carry up to five orders and four of which can fit aboard the tricycle, that navigates the last approximately 300 meters to the customer. The company claims an average delivery time of 27 minutes. The Kiwibots have digitally animated eyes; the customer gestures to cause the hatch to open. The delivery robots, which are manufactured in China and assembled in Berkeley, have approximately a cubic foot of cargo space. They have six cameras and binocular vision for navigation and hazard avoidance and are largely autonomous; human operators at the company's center in

Bogotá Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city of Colombia, and one of the larges ...

monitor their progress at waypoints and take control when needed, such as when crossing streets. They use

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and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, including

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

, and autonomously modify their speed on sidewalks depending on the proximity of people. Initially an iPhone on top of the robot was the primary sensor, robots had to be trained with repeated runs on each route, and rough sidewalks caused problems for the small wheels, requiring careful human monitoring. When a robot encounters a serious problem, such as tampering or becoming lost because of imprecise GPS, the run is completed by a human on foot or on a

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History

Kiwi Campus grew out of a courier delivery service started by Felipe Chávez, the CEO, in 2015 in Bogotá. In 2016, he founded the current company with CTO Jason Oviedo and COO Sergio Pachón in the University of California, Berkeley's Skydeck business incubator, soon substituting robots for human couriers after discovering the cost in the United States; he has said that he was shocked to find that when he ordered a pizza online (or, in an alternate version, a

burrito A burrito (, ) is a dish in Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine that took form in Ciudad Juárez, consisting of a flour tortilla wrapped into a sealed cylindrical shape around various ingredients. The tortilla is sometimes lightly grilled or steamed ...

), the delivery charge was almost as high as the price of the pizza. They first tried using a single robot for the entire distance between restaurant and delivery, but found that inefficient. The prototype Kiwibots were rolled out on the Berkeley campus in March 2017; as of May 23, 20 were operating on campus and in surrounding parts of the city. By early 2018 they were also operating on the Stanford University campus, and by late May 2018 they had filled more than 10,000 orders and were operating throughout the area bounded by Cedar and Sacramento Streets and Ashby and Piedmont Avenues. That month the company was planning expansion to the city of Palo Alto and to San Jose and

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in the remainder of 2018. They are also planning to expand into

business to business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." Having a business name does not separate ...

deliveries. Chávez won an entrepreneurship award from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

in November 2018. In December 2018, a Kiwi delivery bot caught fire near the Berkeley student union because of a defective battery; a passerby used a fire extinguisher to put out the fire, and the company temporarily switched to human courier deliveries. In August 2019, a pilot program in

Sacramento ) , image_map = Sacramento County California Incorporated and Unincorporated areas Sacramento Highlighted.svg , mapsize = 250x200px , map_caption = Location within Sacramento ...

was announced. In July 2020, the company began service in San Jose.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official website
Online food ordering Retail companies established in 2017 Transport companies established in 2017 Internet properties established in 2017 2017 establishments in California American companies established in 2017