Yandex plans to provide its unmanned rover services to other competing companies. The managing director of the company Tigran Khudaverdyan announced this in an interview with Forbes.
According to him, the company plans to engage in sales after scaling the drone business. Now the unmanned company Yandex Self-Driving Group produces about 100 rovers per month, while the operator can monitor only 10 rovers at a time. When Yandex develops a technology that will allow monitoring 100 rovers at the same time, then we can talk about a sale, Khudaverdyan noted.
Yandex introduced the Rover in November 2019. The robot has the size of a suitcase and moves along sidewalks at the speed of a pedestrian. It can carry small packages. In April 2020, Rover started working at Skolkovo. He transported documents and parcels between buildings, and Skolkovo employees gave him tasks using smartphones. Then the company launched food delivery from restaurants in Moscow and Kazan.
In the fall, Yandex rovers began delivering food on campuses at US universities. Delivery is carried out under a cooperation agreement with the American food delivery service Grubhub.
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