Exclusive: Your delivery robot will now offer the blind real-time, on-the-ground eyes around sidewalk hazards |
Exclusive: Your delivery robot will now offer the blind real-time, on-the-ground eyes around sidewalk hazards
The delivery robots rolling down your sidewalk have cameras, sensors, and a constant need to dodge whatever is in their path. Think fallen e-scooters, construction zones, and tricky curbs. That data gets stored so that other robots know what lies ahead of them—and it’s now going to the world’s most widely used GPS app for the blind so they can better navigate city streets.
Coco Robotics, the Los Angeles-based startup operating roughly 10,000 delivery bots across the United States and Europe, is partnering with BlindSquare to remit real-time sidewalk hazard data directly to visually impaired pedestrians. The partnership, announced today, will go live across all six of Coco’s operating markets: Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Jersey City in the U.S. and Helsinki and Turku in Finland.
As Coco’s robots make food deliveries for local restaurants, they continuously log every obstacle they encounter. That data feeds into Coco’s sidewalk map, updated to the minute, and under the new partnership, it will also flow to BlindSquare. The self-voicing app converts the information into spoken alerts delivered in 26 languages, warning users roughly 10 meters before they reach a hazard. In effect, thousands of delivery robots become on-the-ground eyes for people who cannot see what’s ahead.
Boots on the ground, with wheels
The partnership grew out of a European Union grant funding Coco’s operations in Helsinki, where the city’s innovation arm, Forum Virium Helsinki, connected the two companies. Ilkka Pirttimaa, the Finnish developer who built BlindSquare 14 years ago and has watched it grow to roughly 90,000 downloads across 190 countries, was already part of the Helsinki grant consortium alongside Swarco, the........