Domino’s teams up with Nuro for driverless pizza delivery in Houston

Nuro, the self-driving delivery startup, is teaming up with Domino’s to launch a pilot for driverless pizza delivery in Houston, Texas, the companies announced Monday. Starting later this year, Domino’s will use Nuro’s driverless fleet of custom-built robot cars to deliver pizza to select Houston residents who place orders online.

Nuro, which was founded by two ex-members of Google’s pioneering self-driving team, has been using its fleet of R1 robot cars to deliver groceries to residents of Scottsdale, Arizona, and more recently, Houston. If the pilot with Domino’s goes well, it’s safe to assume Nuro will look to expand it to other markets as well.

Nuro has been ramping up its activities in recent months since receiving a $1 billion investment from Japanese tech company SoftBank. The funding round was a huge vote of confidence for one of the lesser known startups working on self-driving technology. Formed in 2016, Nuro has set itself apart by focusing on food delivery rather than people-moving.

Nuro is one of the few companies to be operating fully driverless vehicles on public roads today. Its R1 vehicle (soon to be phased out in favor of the forthcoming R2) is about half as wide as a compact sedan, shorter than most cars, and it has no room inside for human passengers or drivers.

Nuro has built six of these vehicles so far, and it plans to use the cash infusion from SoftBank to manufacture more. It’s also increasing its test fleet of standard cars fitted with self-driving hardware and software to about 50, which it will operate on public roads in California, Arizona, and Texas with safety drivers behind the wheel.

The R1 may not have room for a human driver, but the vehicles aren’t completely unmonitored. Nuro uses chase vehicles with human drivers and remote technology to monitor each driverless vehicle as it makes its deliveries.

Nuro isn’t the only driverless company to partner with Domino’s. The pizza company has also worked with Ford to test self-driving pizza delivery cars in Michigan in 2017. The pilot, which has since ended, launched in 2017 to see how customers would react to stepping out of their homes to fetch pizza from a locked warming chamber in the vehicle.

Robot cars are just one way the tech industry is looking to disrupt delivery, and food take-out in particular. It was recently reported that Uber plans to start delivering fast food by drone in San Diego this summer. Delivery workers look to be the first on the chopping block in the coming shift to autonomy.