UCLA Professor to Head Coco Robotics’ Groundbreaking AI Research Lab

Coco Robotics Partners with UCLA Professor Bolei Zhou to Enhance AI Capabilities

Coco Robotics, a renowned startup specializing in last-mile delivery bots, is embarking on a new venture to leverage the extensive data collected over five years by its robots. The solution comes in the form of a physical AI lab, with University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) professor, Bolei Zhou, taking the lead.

The announcement made by Coco Robotics revealed that Zhou has assumed the role of chief AI scientist at the Los Angeles-based startup.

At its inception in 2020, the company utilized teleoperators to assist the bots in navigating obstacles along their delivery routes. According to Coco Robotics co-founder and CEO Zach Rash, the ultimate objective has always been to enable the last-mile delivery robots to operate autonomously, thereby reducing overall delivery costs. With a wealth of accumulated data, Rash expressed the company’s readiness to delve deeper into automation.

Rash emphasized the significance of the vast amount of data collected in complex urban environments, stating, “We have millions of miles of data collected in the most complicated urban settings possible, and that data is incredibly important for training any sort of useful and reliable real world AI systems.” He added, “We’re now at the point where we have sufficient data scale where I think we can start really accelerating a lot of the research happening around physical AI.”

The decision to appoint Zhou to spearhead this initiative was described as a “no brainer” by Rash. Zhou’s research primarily focuses on computer vision and robotics, particularly in the realm of micromobility rather than full-scale vehicles.

Furthermore, Coco Robotics had already been engaged in collaboration with Zhou. Both Rash and his co-founder Brad Squicciarini are UCLA alumni, having even donated one of their bots to the university’s research lab.

Rash commended Zhou’s expertise, stating, “[Zhou] is one of the leading researchers in the whole world on robot navigation, reinforcement learning, and a lot of the technologies and areas of research that are highly relevant for us.” He added, “He’s been already very capable of recruiting some of the top researchers in the world who he’s worked with in the past to come join Coco and help accelerate things on our end.”

The establishment of this new research lab is distinct from Coco Robotics’ collaboration with OpenAI, which enables the company to utilize OpenAI’s models while granting the AI research lab access to the data collected by the robots.

For the time being, Coco Robotics intends to utilize the information and research findings from the lab internally. Rash clarified that the company has no intentions of selling the data to competitors.

The primary focus will be on enhancing automation and efficiency within the company, particularly concerning the local models employed by the robots. Rash also mentioned plans to share research outcomes with the cities in which they operate, aiming to address obstacles and infrastructure issues that impede the robots’ progress.

Rash outlined the objectives, stating, “Success for this lab really looks at us offering a higher-quality service at an extremely low price. How do we get our costs lower? How do we make this much more affordable for businesses and customers? I think that’s going to create a tremendous amount of growth in this ecosystem.”