There’s a new addition to Toronto Zoo’s menagerie this fall, and visitors may even see the tiny creature roaming freely in the park.
“Bubs” is not nearly as big or as fast as the zebras whose stripes adorn his 3D-printed hull — at just 34 inches tall and clocking four kilometres an hour. But his 90-litre carrying compartment is hauling precious cargo: food for the animals.
The fully autonomous electric robot built by Canadian robotics company Real Life Robotics is primarily operating on back-of-house pathways, away from pedestrians for now, says Jamie Austin, the zoo’s head of finance, technology and innovation.
But depending on how well the animal food pilot project dubbed “Zoober” goes, Real Life Robotics’ head of growth, Sharif Virani, says his company is hoping to expand the project to include more machines and potentially snack delivery for the park’s human population as well. That would allow the zoo to offer more food options, with less space needed for kitchens and vending areas, he says.
“(When) they have a mobile vending program via these robots … they’re bringing in a more diverse offering of products to the zoo, which is in turn going to create more economic activity for the zoo.”
Normally, food deliveries at the zoo — one to two tons a day — are handled by zoo employees, who load food from the zoo’s kitchen into a Ford-F150 and drive it to the enclosures where zookeepers feed the animals.
The pitch for Bubs, says Virani, is that the zoo can save on fuel, carbon emissions and employee time.
While Bubs’ movements are currently observed by a human supervisor, a fully deployed system would have one technician responsible for overseeing simultaneous deliveries by multiple autonomous machines, able to take direct control in the event of a problem, he says.
For the zoo, says Austin, Bubs reflects its commitment to conservation and climate change.
“Technology is playing such an important part of that, and our goal is to become the most technologically advanced zoo in the world,” Austin says. “We have this huge, campus-like setting that provides a terrific test bed for new and emerging technologies.”
Zoo leadership is evaluating what the technology is capable of, its limitations, and what it would take to scale up to a larger fleet in the future, he says.
For Real Life Robotics, closed campus trials like this are part of a series of projects building to the launch of a street-level delivery pilot the company is in talks to begin in an as-yet-unannounced municipality in the GTA as soon as this year.
The zoo provides an enclosed, city-like environment with fewer variables than a public street as well as a predictable set of daily food orders, says Virani — perfect for testing the delivery platform.
Real Life Robotics is not the first company to set its sights on providing short-range robot food delivery in the GTA.
In 2020, when the pandemic had a grip on the city, a similar company, Tiny Mile, sent its robot, Geoffrey, out onto sidewalks in Toronto’s Riverside neighbourhood, making deliveries for local restaurants. By late 2021, the trial was shut down by Toronto council over disability rights advocates concerns about adding non-human traffic to city sidewalks.
Virani, who worked for Tiny Mile at the time, says Real Life Robotics is taking a slower route to street-level delivery to avoid a similar fate. As part of that strategy, it has set out to form relationships with municipalities and regulatory bodies, establishing itself as a company that could provide value immediately, rather than demanding an investment in hypothetical future technology.
To that end, Real Life Robotics is testing software that organizes and displays environmental data collected by fleets of robots or drones about the area in which they operate, allowing them to map safety, comfort and energy-efficiency data such as uneven pavement, noise and light levels, even heat leaks on the outside of buildings.
That software is currently in use in a trial project at Ottawa’s Area X.O testing ground, a test track for communications and transportation technologies including self-driving cars, drones and robotics, with letters of interest from cities including Waterloo and Victoria, B.C., says Virani.
At the zoo, says Virani, Bubs’ data is anonymized by scrubbing the faces off of its camera footage and encrypted to protect the privacy of visitors. Austin says the zoo may use the data collection software to map the Zoo’s Wi-Fi coverage.
The system has its skeptics; Kerstin Dautenhahn, director of the University of Waterloo’s social and intelligent robotics research laboratory with research interest in the area of human-robot interaction, says while she applauds Real Life Robotics’ cautious rollout at the zoo, she’s doubtful robots will be ready for busy city streets anytime soon.
“Letting them loose in scenarios that are very complex, like crowded areas on sidewalks or shopping areas or pedestrian zones, this is bound to cause trouble,” she says.
Robots tend to do well in controlled environments, she says, because there are fewer variables for them to predict. But a busy street full of people, cars, dogs, bicycles and strollers introduces dozens of difficult-to-predict obstacles, any of which could stop, start or dart around without warning.
And a half-metre tall robot rolling around the sidewalk provides an additional obstacle for people with limited mobility or visual impairment, she says.
“That’s why we’re starting slow, figuratively and literally,” says Austin. For the moment, the robot is moving at just four kilometres per hour and the plan is to try it in areas with foot traffic only after an extensive trial period and proof that its collision-avoidance is up to the task.
Meanwhile, says Virani, as long as customers are looking for delivery at a price point lower than the minimum wage for human workers can sustain, there will be a niche in the urban ecosystem for automated delivery.
“Right now, the demand, the number of deliveries out there exceeds the number of drivers that are on the road,” he says. “There needs to be a better way to do it. Our system for local delivery, currently, is broken.”
