>> Announcer: From Milpitas, California at the edge of Silicon Valley it's theCUBE. Covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Milpitas, California at Western Digital offices for the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Meetup. About 300 people, a lot of conversations about the not thousands but millions of problems that have to be solved before we get autonomous vehicles on the road. But there's so many angles to this whole story besides just kind of what you think of as just an Uber, a self driving taxi, or even a self driving car for your personal use and it's really a cool start up here that's actually celebrating their 100th round trip transaction. We're excited to have Daniel Laury. He's a CEO and Chief Product Officer of Udelv. Great to see ya. >> Nice to meet you Jeff. >> So you just came off your keynote presentation and you were showing a great highlight movie of your product, so tell the folks what are you guys all about. >> We're the first public road enabled autonomous driving delivery company. And this is, our aim is to cut the cost of last minute deliveries in half. And to make deliveries easier, more convenient for consumers, more ubiquitous, faster, and cheaper of course. >> So it's pretty interesting. So the use case that you're doing now is you're in San Mateo and you're delivering groceries from Draeger's to the neighborhood. >> Yes, we actually now have four customers. >> Jeff: Oh, you have four, okay. >> Yes, in the matter of a month. We gained three more after Draeger's. Draeger's was our first customer. We've been working with them for the last six months to find the, you know, the best cargo space, the way to organize the compartments and everything. And it's been a fantastic partnership. And so they were our first customer and we're doing deliveries for them almost on a daily basis. And then we added three customers. As people were seeing this orange vehicle in the streets, they started calling us and they say "Hey, can I do it?" So, now we have a florist out of Burlingame and a couple of restaurants as well. >> And how many of these vehicles do you have on the road? >> So for now we have one of them. We are getting our second one next week. There is a third one that is going to be ready in about four weeks from today and then we have a production ramp up from there. >> So what are some of the unique challenges in creating this vehicle and delivering the service that people probably never thought of. >> Right, and it's, in our case, first of all we're not a science project, we're a real business case. Probably one of the first ones in the autonomous driving world. And for us to solve this business case, it's not just about autonomous driving, it's also to have a best customer experience. And so we're not just doing autonomous driving. We're doing a bunch of things. We're building a cargo space, that's mechanical engineering that is adapted which is basically a system of compartments or luggage on wheels if you want. The second thing is we are building apps on the merchant side and the customer side. Third thing is on the autonomy side of things we are doing something that very few other companies are doing which is mastering the first and last hundred feet. Slow motion, high precision. One to two centimeter accuracies. To be able to maneuver in parking lots, be able to back up in driveways and things like that nobody else is doing really that kind of thing. And the last thing is which we're doing and we're probably one of the world's most advanced companies doing this is teleoperations. We have to be able to take control of the vehicle. First of all, monitor the fleet. And second take control of the vehicle in case of a special situation. And we're doing this with an ultra-low latency less than 200 milliseconds between the image we receive from the truck and what the command we're giving back which allows us to actually drive the vehicle in the streets as if it was a video game but it's the reality. >> Right, no we did a piece with Fan Amato. I don't know if you know Fan but we were doing kind of a general purpose. A version of that same capability. It's really, really amazing. >> Frankly I think that autonomous driving is going to need that capability for at least the next decade. >> So the last hundred feet is interesting. You know, I went to a Ford Smart Cities event a little while ago and they talked about kind of curb management because when you have all these kind of fleet vehicles getting people in and out, making deliveries in and out. Kind of the curb in that interchange of the curb is really a tricky thing. It take a lot of nuance, you know. Know when to double park. Can you double park, should you double park. Can you, as you said, get into a driveway. So when you, what your ideal scenario when you do do a grocery drop off, you try to get into the driveway? Get off the double parking situation? >> Yes, absolutely. This is a critical part of what we're doing. And parking lots are actually lawless places. You see cops everywhere but you don't see them in parking lots so you have people backing up from a spot, children pushing carts, pets, you name it. So those are very, very complex situations. Mastering those situations is super important for us because of course our vehicle is going to park in those parking lots to pick up the goods and potentially to deliver. So we developed an AI stack, Artificial Intelligence Stack that starts with a scene estimator. We estimate the scene to see where, what spots are available or if it's a driveway if you have cars parked on the curb and then be able to actually maneuver in that spot. >> Right, but you're writing off a lot. So, you're doing the apps, you're doing all the infrastructure with your partners, you're doing the complexity of the vehicle. And then you've got, you've got to worry about perishable goods, you're taking milk as well as warm stuff. So a lot to chew. How big is your team? Where are you in your development as a company? >> Yes, we're about 30 people right now. And we are going to grow this team quite significantly by probably double the size of the team this year. It's a very ambitious project. It's a very ambitious company and yes, as Elon Musk puts it, success is one of the possibilities. One of the possible outcomes. But not necessarily the likeliest. but we're doing that race, we're in that race. >> So, just before we wrap I want to talk a little bit about the human factors. Cuz a lot of conversation earlier in some of the keynotes about trust and no trust. On one hand people don't trust these things. They said that, you know, they show the survey. I don't trust them. On the other hand we see people in autonomous vehicles as if they were a level five, right? They're sleeping and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. When you engage with customers what are some of their reactions on kind of the trust or not trust? How do they respond to this truck driving up and they walk out and pull their groceries out? >> That's a great question. In our case we're in a very different situation than all the ride sharing and passenger vehicles because we don't, by definition we don't carry passengers. So they only interact with the truck in the sense that they have to retrieve their goods. That's the only thing they do. And so they look at this a lot more favorably than, because it doesn't, they don't have that sense of danger from the vehicle. It's actually more like a wow, this is so interesting. And now I'm getting my deliveries. I know it's going to be exactly 16 minutes. And I get my push notification four minutes before. It gets there and then it's a simple, very, very simple way of doing things. It also will be very, very convenient for returning goods. You will be able to summon the vehicle to your doorstep. You'll put into a locker. It goes for you to UPS. It takes a minute to do it. So people love the service. Their reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. And it's a far less dangerous thing to do than having passengers. >> Right, yeah the first time I saw the video of it I thought was Amazon Lock or which is such a convenient way to interact and so importantly as we move to smart cities because what you don't want is the proverbial sticker on your door that you missed a delivery, like aw rats. So this is such an important part of the enablement of smart cities so really, really cool story. Alright Daniel. So last words, getting excited. Going to get out of individual company relationships and start to have more of a generic service that people can tap into? >> Yes, I, we're tremendously excited about the future of this company. Within two or three weeks from having launched a product on January 30th, we've had, we've received phone calls from every large retailer you name it, in the world wanting to do business with us. So it's a very, very exciting start. >> Alright Daniel, we'll keep an eye. >> Thank you so much, Jeff. >> Thanks for stopping by. Alright, he's Dan, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Event in Milpitas, California. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time. (upbeat music)