The leading autonomous automobile developer Yandex Self-Driving Group announced a multi-annual agreement with Grubhub, the foremost online and mobile food-ordering and delivery platform at college campuses. The Grubhub-Yandex SDG partnership will provide speedier and cost-effective delivery to university campuses in the United States.
An autonomous vehicle is a safe vehicle as it doesn’t require a driver to function, so you are moved to your destination by a robot that never gets tired, distracted, or upset. These autonomous robots know their environment a full 360 degrees and identify information that even the most experienced human drivers could miss.
Yandex autonomous delivery robots will be joining the robust Grubhub’s on-campus food delivery service. Grubhub partners with over 250 college campuses throughout the United States that offer students access to restaurants and pickup services on and off campuses to integrate food plans into their Grubhub accounts seamlessly. Grubhub and Yandex SDG will deliver to selected campuses later in the fall with autonomous robots.
Grubhub is part of the leading online food supply business, Just Eat Takeaway. Determined to connect over 33 million people to their favorite local restaurants, Grubhub improves food ordering by offering new restaurant technology, simple-to-use platforms, and better supply service. In more than 4,000 US areas, Grubhub has more than 300,000 restaurant partners.
Brian Madigan, the vice president at Grubhub, said:
“Together with Yandex, we’re changing the way college students experience food delivery.”
He further added that they are planning to offer cost-effective and quick delivery to student campuses across the country. The reason being the effective navigation capabilities of Yandex robots to parts of the campuses that are difficult for cars to reach.
Yandex autonomous robots have the ability to navigate roads, car-free zones, and crosswalks and reach campus locations not accessible by car. These robots can conduct typically human-guided delivery jobs and provide effective last-mile logistics automation. Yandex SDG’s robotic delivery service is fully integrated into the Grubhub application and is relatively easy. The diner receives a push notification as the rover approaches its final location. The simple way to get a meal is to open the rover’s lid through the Grubhub app.
Dmitry Polishchuk, CEO of Yandex, said:
“We chose to partner with Grubhub for campus delivery because of Grubhub’s unparalleled reach into college campuses across the United States.”
Yandex has planned to utilize the flexibility of Grubhub’s platform and deploy dozens of its rovers, as an active step to commercialize its self-driving technology across various markets in the world.
Since 2017, Yandex has developed its own self-driving technology. The autonomous fleet of Yandex has 170 automobiles in three countries, Russia, Israel, and the US, where it travels more than seven million self-employed miles on the public highways in varied weather and road conditions. Yandex supplies robots based on a similar high-tech self-driving technology stack as the company’s autonomous cars. They may function in extended daylight, moderate snowfall and rain, and controlled and uncontrolled pedestrian crossings. Yandex rovers have been operating in Russia for sale since late 2020 and have supplied hundreds of orders from food retailers and restaurants through the express food delivery platform Yandex-Eats and Yandex-Lavka. After April 2021, Yandex rovers have additionally been delivering food orders from the local restaurants of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
To combat the rising demand for food delivery in the United States college campuses, this collaboration of Yandex and Grubhub will be a huge success.
