Transportation

Nuro’s Delivery Bots Adding CVS Prescriptions To Grocery And Pizza Runs


Nuro, a developer of robotic delivery vehicles, will begin ferrying prescriptions and other items to CVS customers in suburban Houston next month, expanding beyond the grocery and food runs the Silicon Valley company’s small electric delivery bots have been making for more than a year.

The pilot program with CVS Pharmacy kicks off in June in Bellaire, Texas, the companies said. Initially, only a single store will be involved in the project, serving residents living in three adjacent zip codes. Deliveries using Nuro’s street-legal R2 delivery vehicles will be free of charge to customers who place orders for prescription and non-prescription items using CVS.com or the CVS Pharmacy app and select the “autonomous delivery” option.

“We are seeing an increased demand for prescription delivery,” Ryan Rumbarger, CVS Health
CVS
’s senior vice president of store operations, said in a statement. “We want to give our customers more choice in how they can quickly access the medications they need when it’s not convenient for them to visit one of our pharmacy locations.”

Nuro, which has raised $1 billion from SoftBank, Greylock and other investors since its founding in 2016, is among the early standouts in the push to commercialize self-driving technology. Unlike Waymo, the commercial unit created from the Google
GOOGL
Self-Driving Car project, Nuro’s founders decided from the outset that logistics and urban deliveries would be a faster, easier way to deploy the technology than the on-demand robotaxis the Alphabet unit has tested in Arizona for the past few years.

The Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the appeal of contactless delivery technology such as Nuro’s R2s, which are about half the size of a compact car and designed to operate mainly in suburban and low-speed environments. The company won approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation to deploy its micro-vans, which lack conventional driving controls, pedals, windshields and mirrors, in February, and in April California also approved the toaster-like vehicles, which have top speeds of just 25 miles an hour, in a handful of Silicon Valley communities.

In addition to delivery pilots with Kroger, Walmart and Domino’s, last month Nuro also sent some of its R2 units to help haul supplies for medical staff and patients at two temporary California facilities treating coronavirus patients.

“We are excited to expand into an entirely new vertical: health,” said Dave Ferguson, Nuro’s cofounder and president. “Through our partnership with CVS, we hope to make it easier for customers to get medicine, prescriptions, and the other things they need delivered directly to their homes.”



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