Coco Robotics is hiring a UCLA professor to lead a new physics research lab for artificial intelligence

Coco Robotics, a startup known for its fleet of last-mile delivery robots, is looking to gain more insight from data its robots have collected over five years. Her answer: a physical AI lab led by Professor Polly Zhou of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Coco Robotics, which made the announcement on Tuesday, said Zhu has also joined the Los Angeles-based startup as chief artificial intelligence scientist.

When the company launched in 2020, it used remote operators to help robots overcome obstacles in its delivery routes. Zach Rush, co-founder and CEO of Coco Robotics, told TechCrunch that the company’s goal has always been to operate its last-mile delivery robots autonomously to reduce overall delivery costs. Now, Rush said the company has collected enough data to delve deeper into automation.

“We have millions of miles of data collected in the most complex urban environments, and this data is extremely important for training any type of useful and reliable AI system in the real world,” Rasch said. “We’re now at the point where we have enough data scale where I think we can start to accelerate a lot of the research being done around physical AI.”

Rush said the decision to appoint Chu to lead the effort was a “no-brainer.” Rush said Zhou’s research on computer vision and robotics has largely focused on micromobility, rather than full-scale vehicles.

Coco Robotics was already collaborating with Zhou as well. Both Rush and co-founder Brad Squicciarini are UCLA alumni, and have donated one of their robots to the school’s research lab.

“[Zhou] “He’s one of the leading researchers in the whole world in robotic navigation, reinforcement learning, and a lot of technologies and areas of research that are very relevant to us,” Rasch said. “He’s actually been very able to recruit some of the best researchers in the world that he’s worked with in the past to come into Coco and help accelerate things on our end.”

This new research lab is separate from the robotics startup’s collaboration with OpenAI, which allows Coco Robotics to use OpenAI models while the AI ​​research lab gets access to data collected by the company’s robots.

Coco Robotics plans to use the information and research it collects from the lab for its own purposes for now. Rush said the company has no plans to sell the data to its peers.

Instead, it will be used for the company to improve automation and efficiency, which will mainly relate to the local models its robots operate on. Rush said they also plan to share their research results with the cities they work in when appropriate, to help fix obstacles and infrastructure that slow down their robots.

“The success of this lab means we provide a high-quality service at a very low price,” Rush said. “How can we lower our costs? How do we make that more affordable for businesses and customers? I think that’s going to create a tremendous amount of growth in this ecosystem.”