One of the easiest shots at the delivery robots that some of us see roaming the tech cities is that they can’t climb stairs, curbs, or any other small obstacle that even a slug could tackle. Mobinn, a new spinoff from Hyundai, seems to have solved this by using a set of flexible wheels that can easily take it up stairs. They showed off their delivery bot at CES 2024 in Las Vegas.
Stairs and curbs are the bane of many delivery robots and generally the solution was to avoid them. Use bike lanes, sidewalks, and ramps to pretend that sudden changes in elevation aren’t happening in the world. But that’s a problem when you’re delivering to the huge percentage of people who live at least a step away from the street.
Either you can tell them to get down and get their burrito off the sidewalk, or… invent a whole new stair-climbing robot. As you can see in the images above and the videos below, that’s what these engineers decided to do.
CEO Choi Jin explained that the company, short for “mobile innovation,” developed the technology in a few years at Hyundai, but only last year. The robots are partially autonomous, although the one in the video was driving up and down the stairs, and like many such robots they are equipped with a decent array of sensors to achieve this.
I suggested that stairs should be, as they are for humans, quite tiring for the robot, waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of a tiny number of stairs that it can actually climb. But no, Jin said the robot will run for 8 hours taking steps all the time. Who out there can say the same?
Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch
The wheels bend but have a hinged frame on the inside that keeps them from going too far out of shape.
He also pointed out that they get the job done with just four motors, one for each wheel, and no complicated differential setups. It has, of course, a tilting bed, so the payload can stay level, although it will move around somewhat. A pair of doors on the front open to provide access to the food or package inside.
Jin said the robots are being tested in the wild on Korean roads, but the company and the product are still fairly new. Mobinn’s pitch deck also shows they’re working on wheelchair and other mobility options, but so far it looks like the delivery bot is the first out the door.
