Gatik Announces Fully Driverless Operations with Walmart and Expansion to Louisiana
By: Gautam Narang
Tags: Delivery, Automation, Autonomous Vehicles, Supply Chain, Autonomy

It’s been 18 months since we first announced our partnership with Walmart, moving customer orders on the middle mile, from their dark store to a neighborhood market in Bentonville, Arkansas. Earlier today we announced a significant milestone for the autonomous technology space: In 2021, we will be removing the safety driver from our vehicles and undertaking driverless deliveries with Walmart on this route in Arkansas, as well as expanding our operation with Walmart to a second location — Louisiana.

This achievement marks an historic technological and regulatory milestone for the industry, signifying the first ever driverless operation carried out for the supply chain’s middle mile — with the safety of all road users firmly entrenched at the heart of our operations. We are able to achieve this milestone because at Gatik, we operate exclusively on fixed, repeatable routes. It’s an approach we refer to as structured autonomy. It’s safe and efficient because it enables us to constrain the challenge of autonomy, thereby heavily over-optimizing our delivery routes and minimizing edge-cases.

Gatik has taken a radically divergent hybrid approach towards the system architecture, implementation & validation of self-driving vehicles — called ‘Explainable AI’. We decompose the massive monolithic DNNs into micro-models whose intended functionality is restricted to a very specific explainable task, and build rule-based fallback & validation systems around them. Given extensive knowledge of Gatik’s well-defined ODDs and hybrid architecture, we are able to hyper-optimize our models with exponentially less data, establish gate-keeping mechanisms to maintain explainability, and ensure continued safety of the system for unmanned operations.

Our journey to reaching this point has involved meticulous preparation. In partnership with Walmart, we have worked closely with legislative and regulatory personnel in Arkansas to inform the development of autonomous vehicle legislation, and share detailed information on all aspects of our operations in the state. We take great pride in our relationships at Gatik, and we see the development of strong, accountable and transparent relations with all levels of government as critical to the advancement not only of our own operations but of the autonomous vehicle industry as a whole.

Our driverless deployment not only represents the next frontier in autonomous goods movement, but also signifies a vital commercial milestone. When we founded Gatik in 2017, we set out to address a critical industry pain point in the supply chain: the costly and challenging middle mile. With a drastic rise in e-commerce, driven by rapidly evolving consumer needs and compounded by driver shortages, the middle mile has been a thorn in the side of major retailers, and one which can only be solved with automation. Driverless operations will enable our customers to realize the full potential of autonomous delivery: significant cost savings which can be passed onto the consumer, a high-functioning hub-and-spoke distribution model and short delivery times which keep consumers satisfied.

We’re immensely proud of the dedication of our teams in making this vision a reality. Our mission at Gatik has always been to deliver goods safely and efficiently, and together, we’re achieving this goal.

Interested in joining our fast-growing and highly execution-oriented team? Check out open positions at http://www.gatik.ai/careers. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium.