How the Nuro Robotic Delivery Car Was Built

[Narrator] An automated car, one that relies on sensors

and complex algorithms to navigate,

is a challenge that many companies are tackling.

But if an automated car was only designed to transport goods

and not people, how might it look?

They don't have steering wheels.

They don't have pedals.

They don't have seats.

There's no way for a person to sit inside of this vehicle.

It is completely focused on goods.

[Narrator] Wired spoke to Nuro's chief technology officer

and design head to learn how they engineered

their robotic delivery vehicle.

[upbeat music]

This is Nuro, an automated delivery vehicle.

We've now gone through three generations

of vehicle development and we learned so much

from even just some of the hardware design elements

or the way that the vehicle operated on roads

or how it interacted with our autonomy stack

[Narrator] Companies around the world are developing

robotic delivery vehicles to aim at cutting down

on our local trips, picking up groceries

and delivering food.

The team tackled two challenges when making the robot,

getting the technology right

and designing a car from scratch.

It starts here with their arch.

So here you can see a main lidar,

which has 360 degree view of the world,

creates a really robust point cloud

for our system to use to know exactly

where everything is around it.

I would describe it as the ears

and the eyes of the vehicle.

We have a camera detects traffic lights

and then we have 360 cameras all the way around as well.

Part of the reason why we have that distinctive arch

is so that we can pack all of that long range

sensing technology into an integrated sensor pod.

It also means if we wanna upgrade the sensor pod

we can do that without completely tearing up

all the beautiful body panels that you made

in the rest of the vehicle.

[Narrator] The team debuted their first design,

the R1 in 2018.

So R1, we built that within the very first year

of the company even existing from ideation to design,

so it was a really rapid, really fast program

to get R1 up and running.

We learned a lot about the capacity

that we need in the vehicle.

So we had to adapt the cargo volume

to make sure we fit 24 bags of groceries

and get all the way up to 500 pounds of cargo volume.

One of the things we changed with R2

was having the doors go a bit higher

as some tall folks might bunk their head on the top

of the the shorter doors on R1.

With R2, we wanted to make a fleet of these

and so we really took our time to really detail design

of custom electric vehicle chassis with a little bit

of a different body panel set up

so that we could actually make a large fleet of these.

[Narrator] In their latest model,

the team honed in on designing a car that was friendly

to pedestrians but suited for the road.

The front face was designed to evoke a friendliness,

the lights, for example, they're circular,

they look friendly, they're little cut off on the top

so they has a sense of urgency as well

because we want to be friendly, we wanna be inviting

but we also don't want to communicate, you know what?

Take five, six, seven, 10 minutes to unload your grocery

because at some point we have to get to the next person.

[Narrator] They also reimagined how the car sounded.

[car beeping]

Took us about six months and with multiple iterations

because you're designing a sound on a laptop

but you can really just tell how it sounds

when it's on road, when it's driving

and it mixes in with the sounds of the movement.

We spent a lot of time on the speaker actually as well.

What we realized if you, at some point,

want to operate in cities

and you have a lot of background noise,

you have to have a much bigger speakers.

We've positioned microphones around the vehicle

for detecting emergency vehicle sirens

and so that's what's actually going on back here.

So even during the time from R1 to R2,

you saw a really big upgrade in the sensors

that we had on the vehicle

and the same thing is happening now from R2 to the Nuro,

is a massive upgrade, both in the capabilities

of the sensors that we have, our lidar, our radar,

our cameras, as well as the compute,

which is the brain of the vehicle, have all been upgraded.

[Narrator] In their latest version,

the team added safety features

like an airbag to protect pedestrians.

That's what's actually packaged right behind here,

in that worst case scenario,

protect someone's head and neck

and really minimize the injury to them in that scenario.

[Narrator] Before they build their prototypes,

they start with a wooden model.

The wooden model was really the first functional prototype

that we built off our current vehicle.

We've experiment with loading floor height,

with the volume of bags that we wanted to accomplish.

We take the feedback that we're getting

from the engineering team

and wrap whatever components we receive.

Mill them out of clay, do adjustments by hand,

then 3D scan them and put them back in ducad,

all the way to tooling release.

So it's a really interesting, actually very manual process.

And what Daniel described is really going

from very low fidelity models to very high fidelity models.

You can do that with a wooden model

but it's much more painful to do that

with a full clay model 'cause once you do that,

it's expensive and you don't wanna do that multiple times.

[Narrator] Nuro plans on hiring out their vehicles

to companies who will use their fleet to deliver everything

from packages to pizza.

Right now, the company is operating

on the roads in Scottsdale, Arizona, Houston, Texas

and the Bay area with plans to expand nationwide.

I can't wait to see over the next five years

how this really scales and starts to get out

and really give people time back.

[upbeat music]