Goggo’s autonomous robots arrive in Zaragoza: soon we will begin to see them handing out packages on its sidewalks
Goggo Network, the startup of Yasmine Fage and Martin Varsavsky, has announced the achievement of a logistics license for autonomous robots in Spain, with Zaragoza, with whose city council it has collaborated, the city in which the project will be developed to put on its sidewalks up to 80 little robots.
These devices, 100% electric, will replace vans, motorcycles and bicycles in the work of last-mile logistics transport. That is, the one that goes from the logistics plants to the final destinations, homes and companies.
Autonomous electric robots 80 x 80 x 40 cm
The project is divided into four phases. The first, which will last until the end of summer, will be limited to running simulations in the areas where the first robots will be assigned tomorrow. Subsequently, the rest of the phases will arrive, aimed at achieving public, technical and commercial acceptance by the city tomorrow, as reported by the company.
Those first steps of the project will be marked by the continuous monitoring of the robots’ operation before actually putting them on the streets. Then it will be time for them to start delivering home orders. In the company’s statement they have not specified whether orders of a specific type, such as restaurants or food, will have priority, although they have clarified that local businesses will have a great weight in the project.
The robots will arrive with LiDAR sensors, cameras to see the 360º of the environment, ultrasound sensors or GNSS, a term that encompasses the different global satellite positioning systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo…). Thanks to them you will be able to detect obstacles, be they pedestrians, cars, bicycles, animals… and avoid them or stopwhichever is safer.
Although they are autonomous robots designed so that they can get from point A to point B on their own, they can also be controlled remotely by a human operator in case it is necessary. Something similar to the autonomous cars that have been tested in recent years: a human as backup in emergencies. Only here, logically, they will not go up, but will perform remote control.
these bots they weigh about 40 kilos and they have a rectangular shape: 80 centimeters high and long by 40 wide, not counting the mast that raises a yellow flag to add visibility. Its appearance is reminiscent of the old baby carts. They move at 5 kilometers per hour so as not to move much faster than pedestrians and facilitate coexistence on the sidewalks.
Goggo has also introduced an autonomous food truck in the past, food trucks, and a drone whose purposes were not detailed. Despite the fact that Zaragoza is the city in which Goggo has obtained the first logistics license for autonomous robots, at the end of 2021 this company made headlines for the announcement of Glovo, the home delivery company for any type of product or food, from start using its robots from 2022. Zaragoza, presumably, anticipates this launch, at least in the testing phase.