It’s Saturday night. You have some friends over and you have had a few drinks. But you have a problem. You are starving. You order a pizza online and after an hour wait, the delivery driver arrives. You scrounge some money together for a crappy $4 tip. The delivery guy looks at you in disgust and drops your pizza. Your night is ruined, all because you didn’t order from KiwiBot.
KiwiBot is the newest delivery service to hit the Denver campus, but it is not your average service. KiwiBot is a start-up from UC Berkeley that makes use of delivery bots to bring your food to you in a less expensive and more sustainable fashion. KiwiBot at DU is a student-run team that brings together a variety of disciplines to best serve the university community.
Adjunct Professor Jim Ducay supervises the students on the project. He got the wheels turning when he connected with KiwiBot’s head of business, David Rodriquez.
“We have got a program [Project XITE] here at DU where we can bring a team of students together and use the university as a living laboratory,” Ducay said, when referring to his early communication with Rodriquez.
“Denver is an important stage for Kiwi. To go from a project that worked one time to a consistent and solid company,” said Rodriquez.
They have been testing the bots for a while now, but they just opened up for orders in the last two weeks.
“This week we are very close to hitting our 100th delivery to a real person,” said Rodriquez.
KiwiBot has experienced heavy demand in its short trial period at DU, even though the service is still in its testing phase.
“We are not commercial, yet. This is still the trial phase. Everyone using it right now is a beta customer,” said Charlie Cummings, a fourth-year marketing major and head of product marketing for KiwiBot at DU.
While it may be in the trial phase, it already has multiple businesses in its delivery pool. Birdcall, Jerusalems, Snarfs, Chipotle and Fat Shack have already joined, but the team is working on adding more.
“As the service expands, we are hoping to accommodate special requests. Like, ‘hey I want Gatorade and a bottle of Advil.’ The idea is we are trying to fix something for the customer. So, if they open the app and they are like ‘I am hungry, I have a headache and I am dehydrated,’ we can fix that problem,” said Cummings.
Adding more organizations is important to the team, but safety and integration are of utmost importance.
“Safety is the no. 1 priority. It travels a mile to two miles an hour. The goal here is to integrate it into the campus movement,” said Ducay.
The ones responsible for this integration are third-year computer engineering major Theo Heimann and third-year mechanical engineering major Bobby Chopra.
“We have people supervising them as they drive, so if there is an obvious need for them to stop they can, but there is also a part on the front of the robot where if someone gets within a meter and a foot the robot will stop,” said Heimann.
The robots even have set waiting zones that they will idle in to avoid disrupting the DU’s foot traffic.
“There are fluid hotspots. Somewhere where the robots can idle out of the way, and wait for the next order,” stated Cummings.
These fluid hotspots also allow for the bots to speed up delivery times by being on routes that have highly in-demand goods.
Trial delivery times are currently around 55 minutes, using only two robots. The team expects that number to drop to about 35 minutes as they expand the fleet of bots.
To help them, they are asking for feedback on KiwiBot from DU Students. Cummings and graduate communications student Annette Malysa are in charge of receiving and implementing this feedback.
“Annette and I work closely on building up a user base, getting students involved, and figuring out the problems students have specifically,” said Cummings.
The project is currently restricted to DU’s campus. Delivery is currently only available from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. with a long-term goal of 24-hour service. You can download the KiwiBot app today from the App and Google Play store.
