Hyundai and KIA crack and launch a coffee delivery robot

This is not an April Fools’ fake news: Hyundai and Kia are unveiling their first autonomous assistant capable of carrying coffees…

Is this the height of emptiness? Assistant robots will be part of our daily lives in the coming years, but developing a solution to deliver coffees to employees at a company… We’re far from Tesla’s humanoid solution.

Hyundai and Kia, which belong to the same industrial group, have thus introduced their new delivery robot with autonomous driving and facial recognition. It is designed for so-called complex environments such as offices and shopping centers.

Capable of reaching speeds of 1.2 meters per second – or 4.32 km/h – while navigating around obstacles thanks to a suspension system that ensures the balance of its platform. At its core, a space large enough to hold a small parcel weighing up to 10 kg or 16 cups of coffee. Very practical indeed.

For Connected Buildings

An installed light inside the cargo makes objects easy to recognize. When the door opens, the storage platform advances, allowing users to easily load and unload items.

The remarkable feature of DAL-e Delivery is its autonomous driving ability to navigate to and from all floors of the building, seamlessly interfacing with the elevator and door control systems. Additionally, it guarantees a quick delivery service by creating optimal routes in real-time.

When DAL-e Delivery arrives at its destination, it recognizes the recipient using its built-in camera. Thanks to advanced facial recognition technology developed by Hyundai Motor and Kia’s robotics laboratory, the door opens automatically without the recipient needing to enter a password. This facial recognition technology, officially certified by the Korean Agency for Security and Internet, is 99.9% accurate.

Hyundai Motor and Kia will deploy DAL-e Delivery in the second quarter of this year.

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