The shipping giant FedEx has given up its aims in robotics, at least for the moment. Remember Purple? The small delivery bot that was supposed, in the company's intentions, to speed up the timing for the last mile (and avoid hiring staff)?
All right. According to a report from Robotics 24/7, an email from the company's transformation manager Sriram Krishnasamy illustrated to employees a new company objective called "Drive", in which the Roxo robot seems to have no place, no future. And it's not a rumor: the email explicitly stated that the droid did not meet the short-term plans for the chosen new business model. In short, Roxo is dead.
Yet it looked promising
Roxo was created in collaboration with DEKA Research and Development Corp. When it was launched with great fanfare by the company, the robot could stand about eight feet tall and weighed 450 kilos. Its purpose was to move through crowded neighborhoods and even climb porch steps to directly deliver packages to customers' doors.
Roxo was equipped with 360-degree LiDAR sensors and remote cameras, and housed a sturdy electric battery. It had four wheels to guide it through the streets and even had a small screen on the front that could announce messages.
Deliveries will continue, by hand and in other ways
The new business model will lead FedEX to re-discuss a lot of what it has done, including the collaborations it has started. For example, Drive could put Alphabet's Wing, which supplied unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to FedEx for drone deliveries in the city of Christiansburg, Virginia.
The sign of something that we could have foreseen months ago, in a "jungle", that of delivery, where there is a “lion” who leaves no prisoners. The good thing, however, is that the human factor forcefully returns to the surface.
Until new developments (the robotics continues to advance), the deliveries will all be by hand.
