Apple Challenges India Antitrust Probe, Says CCI Copied Rivals’ Claims in App Store Case 
AI Memory Chip Shortage Likely to Persist Despite Korea Investment Boom, Nomura Says 
Bank of America Upgrades T-Mobile to Buy, Says LEO Satellite Fears Are Overdone 
Kuaishou Stock Jumps as Kling AI Secures $2 Billion Funding Round 
Foxconn Q2 Revenue Surges Nearly 40% on Strong AI Server Demand 
OpenAI Proposes 5% U.S. Government Stake Amid AI Policy Talks 
Trump Administration to Launch Voluntary AI Standards for Frontier Models 
Samsung Q2 Profit Seen Soaring as AI Memory Demand Keeps Chip Prices Elevated 
BHP Workers Approve New Labour Agreement at WA Iron Ore Operations 
Smartphones are helping filmmakers tell the stories the movie industry overlooks 
Meta Cloud Ambitions Could Challenge AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Says Morgan Stanley 
Nvidia Stock Rises as SemiAnalysis Sees AI Data Center Revenue Beating Wall Street Forecasts 
Tesla Q2 Deliveries Lift Chinese Auto Suppliers as EV Demand Improves 
Switch Seeks $2 Billion Funding at Nearly $50 Billion Valuation Ahead of Potential IPO 
Apple Expands iPhone Lineup, Boosts Foldable iPhone Production Plans Through 2027 
Kioxia Bets on AI Memory Boom With Next-Gen NAND Production in Japan 
easyJet Agrees in Principle to £5.23 Billion Castlelake Takeover Offer 
On Tuesday, Feb. 20, Uber Eats announced that it is rolling out self-driving delivery robots in Japan. For this, its parent company, Uber Technologies, Inc., said it is teaming up with Mitsubishi Electric and Cartken robotics firm for the project.
Uber said that its online food ordering and delivery platform will start delivering food orders using self-driving robots nationwide. The machines will navigate the sidewalks when transporting orders to homes and other locations.
Autonomous Delivery Kick-off Date
According to CNBC, Uber Eat said it had scheduled the deployment of its sidewalk robot deliveries for the last week of March. However, the companies said the initial launch will only cover some selected areas in Tokyo.
The food delivery unit of Uber added that Japan is its first international site for its autonomous robot delivery operations. It was noted that Uber Eats operations were limited to just a few cities in the United States.
Partnership with Mitsubishi and Cartken
The use of delivery robots in Japan indicates the latest effort shared by Uber Eats and Cartken, which already offer sidewalk robot deliveries in U.S. states such as Miami and Fairfax, Virginia. In other cities in the region, Uber Eats joined forces with Nuro, Motional, and Serve Robotics to start the autonomous delivery operations.
“This collaboration signifies a leap forward in redefining the future of food delivery, making it more accessible and sustainable to consumers in Japan,” Cartken’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Anjali Jindal Naik, said in a statement.
On the other hand, Mitsubishi Electric’s senior general manager of the Advanced Application Development Center, Development Division, Shoji Tanaka, said that the robot delivery services are “considered to be an effective countermeasure to the logistics crisis that will become more serious in the future.”
Tanaka added, “We hope that this newly announced initiative will serve as a catalyst for the spread of robot delivery services in Japan. In the future, we will work with buildings and factory infrastructure, which is one of our strengths, so autonomous robots will be able to deliver inside various facilities.”
