This WALL-E Self-Driving Pod Wants To Replace The Airport Wheelchair (And Much More)

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A few years ago, it might have been tough for a self-driving machine to navigate through a mall or airport. Today, that’s largely solved. The harder part? Navigating crowds of busy, hurrying people – including children and the elderly – without any accidents or even incidents. A&K Robotics is betting they’ve got that solved, and they’ve got a fancy new $8 million round of funding and deals with Vancouver International Airport and Madrid based airport operator Aena to bolster their claim.

I recently sat down with CEO Matthew Anderson at Web Summit Vancouver to talk about Cruz, A&K's autonomous pod for airports.

"If you can solve autonomous navigation through a crowded airport, you can solve autonomous navigation through almost anything," Anderson told me.

The pitch is simple: instead of waiting for a wheelchair and a staff member to push it, a traveler with mobility challenges walks up to a pod, sits down, taps in a destination, and the pod takes them anywhere in the terminal on its own. Or, using the airport’s app (finally, a reason to download an airport app!) you call it to your location and zip off wherever you need to go.

So: WALL-E, basically. Or the Jetsons, if you prefer. I told Anderson I’ve got a bad knee right now and wouldn’t mind one myself for a large conference like CES in Vegas.

Anderson says that A&K isn’t starting in airports because airports are easy. It’s starting there because they’re brutally hard. That’s the idea: warehouses are utilitarian and predictable. An airport at boarding time is a solid wall of unpredictable humans, all moving at different speeds in different directions. Even humans have difficulty getting through the lines that spontaneously generate when an aircraft is boarding.

A&K’s solution is what Anderson calls "crowd-centric AI," which is the company’s actual DNA, in his words. Each pod carries more than 30 sensors and is tracking thousands of variables a minute: not just where obstacles are, but how they’re moving, how fast, and how the overall flow of people is shifting. Most mobile robots solve this by always yielding to humans, which makes progress slow and invites mischievous humans to interfere with their progress. A&K says that its pods can move with the flow instead of stopping dead every time a person crosses their path.

And when there is a person or crowd in the way and no obvious route around? Anderson has a solution for that too, and it’s pretty ingenious: directional audio.

If you’ve ever been to the Sphere in Vegas, you’ve probably experienced directional audio. Step inside the target zone, and you hear the sound. Move even just slightly away, and you don’t hear a thing.

Anyone who’s been near an airport golf cart knows how annoying the beep-beep-beep can be. In some cases, it’s ridiculously loud. Anderson’s team built directional audio instead: A&K’s pods aim a notification only at the person who needs to move, while the traveler reading a book on the next bench hears nothing. Volume even auto-adjusts to ambient airport noise, making airports – believe it or not – a slightly more peaceful place.

Powering all this is a software stack fed by more than 30 sensors, Anderson says. That includes sonar, 2D and 3D LIDAR, inertial measurement units, heat sensors.

In other words, just about everything except GPS … and that omission is deliberate. A&K wanted to prove the pods work in GPS-denied environments, and the pods can run fully offline if the network drops and there’s no connection to A&K’s fleet-management layer. Cruz can navigate without a map using SLAM, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, but A&K maps each site anyway, taking about half a day for 500,000 square feet, so the pods know where they're allowed to go and where they aren't.

A&K just closed an $8 million CAD Series A. It’s a pretty lean number for how polished the product currently looks, thanks to the company building the bulk of this on pre-seed and seed money.

Cruz is live with two launch customers: Aena, the world’s largest airport operator with more than 60 airports, in Madrid; and Vancouver International, rated the top airport in North America, Anderson said. The new capital will help A&K expand -- they’ve had to turn pilot projects down to date – and double headcount.

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