Uncrewed Systems Technology 049 - April/May 2023

49 Ottonomy was founded in late 2020 by CEO Ritukar Vijay and CTO Pradyot Korupolu. Its headquarters are in New York, it has a subsidiary in Uttar Pradesh, India, and it employs more than 40 people. “I’ve been involved in autonomous driving and robotics for around 15 years now,” Vijay says. “I started with UGVs for defence applications, before going into autonomous warehouse robots and then worked on ADAS and autonomy for automotive vehicles.” That track record, combined with the automotive industry’s focus shifting largely from autonomy to electrification between 2016 and 2020, motivated him and some colleagues to look further afield for use cases where autonomous mobility could solve tangible problems. “Rather than trying to push autonomy to solve road congestion and accidents – which it might still do in the future – we saw that autonomous last-mile deliveries could immediately help retailers, restaurants and others in the pandemic and amid increasing labour shortages, as UGVs could enable a limited staff to do more while using less energy,” he says. “So we started creating our first MVP [minimum viable product] during the pandemic, aimed at both indoor and outdoor autonomy. We already knew how to do the latter safely using 3D Lidars and cameras, and although many other developers such as Starship were dependent on GNSS and camera-based teleoperation, we wanted full autonomy from day one – the Waymo way, rather than the Tesla way.” Indoor autonomy soon became something of a prime focus for Vijay and his team, partly because of early interest from airports including Cincinnati/ Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) in autonomous robots that could navigate crowded terminals to deliver food and shopping to passengers. A pilot project followed in December 2020, which in addition to achieving successful autonomous navigation and deliveries indoors, provided critical lessons on the UGV’s useability and aesthetics. “We took those lessons to take it from an MVP to a commercially deployable product, and then launched the Ottobot 1.0 in 2021 at CVG,” Vijay says. In 2022, Ottonomy unveiled the Ottobot 2.0, which improves upon and replaces the 1.0 version as the company’s flagship product. It is a four-wheeled, 4WD system, fully electrically powered and weighs around 200 lb (90.7 kg). It features as standard two sliding metal doors within a mostly metallic hull, as well as a large infotainment screen on the front face and a smaller customer interface screen above, for scanning QR codes to confirm the identity of a recipient at hand-off. From 1.0 to 2.0 Although the Ottobot 1.0 was optimised over the MVP design for easier use and an improved look (having the outward appearance of a robotic shopping trolley), the various trials it underwent in public spaces provided further crucial data for Ottonomy that informed how it should develop the 2.0 version. “We’re all engineers at Ottonomy, and as other tech firms will have Ottonomy Ottobot | Digest We saw that last- mile deliveries could help retailers and others in the pandemic, as UGVs could enable fewer staff to do more using less energy Uncrewed Systems Technology | April/May 2023 Ottonomy has formed partnerships with several customers for autonomous delivery networks, the most recent being Goggo in Spain