Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
Robotaxis have gotten a ton of hype in the past decade, and especially the past five years or so. What has gotten much less attention is the potential for autonomous delivery vehicles. Perhaps that is because humans are still needed for managing the cargo and deliveries the vast majority of the time, but there’s progress on this front too, and that now involves Momenta.
Momenta has been working on robotaxis since 2021. Now it has launched robovans. They are operating in its home district of Xiangcheng in Suzhou for now.
Momenta notes that this is “the latest real-world application of the company’s proprietary World Model.” The robovans are being deployed 24/7 for parcel delivery. As the company describes this, it is “driverless logistics that close the critical ‘last mile’ in urban supply chains.” But how do the parcels get from the van to the customer? Unfortunately, Momenta doesn’t explain that. I’d love to know. There are various options, but they each require very different things in order to work well. Too bad they left out the most interesting part.
