Lifts to lobbies: robots tackling the last-mile delivery hurdle

In the near future, a delivery driver could save dozens if not hundreds of trips going door to door in Singapore’s business clusters.

Those trips are costing logistics companies hours of wasted time each day, according to QuikBot founder and CEO Alan Ng.

His solution? A network of short- and long-distance robots that can operate indoors and outdoors as well as a system of smart lockers.

(L-R) QuikBot’s range of robots include QuikCats, QuikBoxes (smart lockers), and QuikFoxes / Photo credit: QuikBot

With over US$2 million of bootstrapped capital and US$600,000 in funds raised so far, the company has created robots that can pass through turnstiles, “call” for lifts, and go from floor to floor – all with no human help.

“The final mile of delivery – the pick-up – remains as manual as three thousand years ago,” Ng tells Tech in Asia.

Ng, who is also the founder of Carestar Robotics, the distributor of Keenon robots in Singapore, has spent the last four years speaking to building owners and elevator-makers and retrofitting lifts with IoT devices that can communicate with its robots and connect to the cloud.

Existing solutions on the market don’t solve issues like long wait times to get through security at office lobbies and when receivers show up late, Ng points out.

To address this, the firm designed lockers (QuikBox) which can have up to six pigeonholes and be unlocked using unique pins sent via SMS.

Parcels are transported using another short-distance autonomous robot (QuikCat), and if a receiver is late to arrive, these can be deposited outside a person’s office while the QuikCat moves on to fulfill other parcel drop-offs.

Delivering more orders matters

In Singapore, QuikBot’s fleet of robots is managing “hundreds of parcels” per week, Ng shares.

Across Singapore and Dubai, where the firm is also conducting pilots, QuikBot now has over 20 robots and 40 smart lockers. These comprise QuikCats that manage floor-to-floor deliveries, QuikFoxes that handle longer distance transfers between buildings, and QuikBox smart lockers.

The QuikCat travels at 5 kilometers per hour and can carry up to 115 kilograms, while a QuikFox can transport up to three QuikCats.

Each robot is outfitted with advanced tracking sensors and camera monitoring systems and receives instructions from a central command center in the cloud via Wi-Fi, 4G, or 5G connections.

The problem of buy-in

Funding next-gen’s ‘LLM-integrated’ robots