Robot.com R-kiwi

R-kiwi is the sidewalk delivery rover that Robot.com - the American company that operated until 2025 under the name Kiwibot - sells today as the workhorse of its fleet. The machine itself is not new: the line started as a campus food-delivery service at UC Berkeley in 2017, and by the time the company announced its rebrand on 8 May 2025 it had logged more than 1.7 million autonomous tasks. The R-kiwi name arrived with the relaunched Robot.com site at the end of October 2025, and the counter has since passed 2.4 million tasks across more than 500 active robots. What the robot does is deliberately narrow. It carries meals, parcels and retail goods along public sidewalks and campus paths, at a walking-pace 4.4 mph (about 7.1 km/h), with a 19-litre enclosed cargo compartment. Robot.com rates the battery at 10 to 12 hours of work between charges and offers an optional wireless charging system, so a machine can serve a full shift without a human touching it. The company states Level 4 autonomy for the fleet operating across North America, and stresses all-weather duty: rain, snow and heat. The sensor package is modest by autonomous-vehicle standards and appropriate for a sidewalk: six HD cameras and a superwide-angle 3D LiDAR feeding real-time navigation on NVIDIA compute. A deliberately expressive display serves as the robot's face - the company treats public acceptance as a design requirement rather than a cosmetic afterthought, and the small footprint is presented the same way, as a machine built to stay out of pedestrians' path. The fleet is also a data asset. In June 2026 Robot.com published R-KNav, a 10,000-hour multimodal navigation dataset recorded by these rovers, and opened the FoMo Challenge inviting outside teams to train vision-based navigation models and test them on the real machines. Commercially the robot works under a Robot-as-a-Service subscription rather than outright sale, with deployments named for Sodexo - which signed a seven-year expansion agreement on 20 August 2026 - as well as Grubhub, SKIP and Amazon Web Services, across the United States, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Robot.com publishes no dimensions, mass or price for R-kiwi, and issues no datasheet for the model. One published figure is inconsistent on the manufacturer's own page: the cargo graphic reads 19 L, while the alternative text attached to the same image still says 18 L. This profile follows the figure shown in the graphic.

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