If a smiling pink Geoffrey shows up at your door with an order of Tim Horton doughnuts or your favorite local shawarma, odds are you live in Toronto. As Markets Insider reports, Canadian telecom Bell has reached an agreement with startup Tiny Mile to harness its 5G capabilities to power its food delivery bots.
Each Geoffrey unit is controlled by a remote operator who will help it navigate from the restaurant to the patron’s door. Built-in cameras and GPS, combined with high definition video telematics data capabilities help the Geoffrey and its remote driver operate safely and quickly in crowded urban areas.
“Bell is thrilled to work with the Canadian entrepreneurs at Tiny Mile to leverage the incredible speed and response time of Bell 5G and enable this innovative and timely food delivery option for their customers with mobile edge computing (MEC),” stated Nauby Jacob, Senior Vice President, Products and Services at Bell Mobility.
“The Bell 5G network will enable our remote controlled robots to transmit large amounts of data with incredibly fast speeds – an important milestone in advancing the development of our autonomous delivery model – which is a perfect fit for us,” agreed Tiny Mile CEO Ignacio Tartavull. “This will help to optimize our business delivery model with an improved solution to help our team do what they do best – deliver fresh restaurant meals to our customers.”
In its introductory phase, Geoffrey will rely more heavily on a strong 5G signal and a skilled remote driver. Over time, Tiny Mile intends to transition to a combination of 5G and MEC operations that will empower the units to make instantaneous decisions to react and avoid collisions and road hazards. Ultra-low latency response times and automating services will collect streaming data from multiple cameras and sensors on each robot should allow the units to keep improving their performance.
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