Wilko has invested £ 3m in an autonomous delivery company that plans to use its driverless vehicles on UK roads by 2023.
The retailer was announced today as the main investor in StreetDrone, which will use the funding to accelerate the deployment of its robotic car-size delivery units.
Wilko CEO Jerome Saint-Marc said autonomous vehicles are “the future of automated logistics” with StreetDrone “undoubtedly one of the key players that will lead the way in making this technology feasible”.
“One of the main reasons we support the StreetDrone team is because this type of transformative technology can have a huge and positive impact on hard-working families – and that ethos runs through everything we do at Wilko,” said Saint-Marc. “Ultimately, it has the potential to cut costs for customers when used in retail.”
As part of the investment, Jonathan Griffin, director of WilkinsonFuture – the venture capital arm of Wilko’s parent company AHWL – will serve on the StreetDrones board and oversee the investment on Wilko’s behalf.
Wilko said his goal is to offer customers autonomous deliveries that “enhance their experience and make it easier for them to access the products”.
StreetDrone has been developing proprietary autonomous vehicle technology from its Oxford headquarters since 2017 and has customers across Europe, Asia and Australasia. The company claims to be the first company in the world to offer subscription-based software for autonomous driving and the first in Europe to operate an “open source” autonomous vehicle on the road.
The company said it focused on getting autonomous vehicles into “well-mapped” and lower speed ranges first to avoid “challenging high-speed situations where the technology is orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive”. The prototype of the driverless delivery vehicle from StreetDrones is called Pix-E.
“We are very excited to have the support of a major UK retailer,” said StreetDrone Founder and CEO Mike Potts. “Wilko will help us achieve our goal of bringing autonomous last mile services to UK and European roads, for the benefit of both retailers and consumers. Our technology, tailored to Wilko’s determined strategy to enrich the lives of its customers, is the perfect amalgamation of our skills and their requirements. “
The StreetDrone vehicles will be significantly larger than the robots Starship uses to deliver groceries on behalf of Co-op and Tesco in Milton Keynes and Northampton. Globally, Starships bots – which are also used on several university campuses in the USA – have made more than 1.6 million autonomous deliveries, traveled millions of kilometers and made more than 80,000 road crossings daily. Starship named former Morrisons CEO Dalton Philips to its board of directors earlier this month.
