Project description
An insight into the future of parcel delivery
Last mile is the most important step in the process of e-commerce home delivery. However, despite the continuously improved transportation services, the present landscape remains problematic. Failed deliveries, damaged items, unsustainable costs for delivery, traffic congestion and pollution are a few of the problems that affect end consumers, businesses, society and the environment. The aim of the EU-funded ELIPORT project is to offer an intelligent system of solutions to the current last mile delivery challenges. The project will exclude any human intervention by introducing a fleet of autonomous, ground-based robots that will travel between the pick-up point and the drop-off point, and by automatising the pickup process.
Objective
Despite rapid advancements in the way that we receive packages, current last mile delivery solutions are still antiquated in comparison to the technology that has been deployed in other sectors of the industry. This causes PROBLEMS: for end consumers (failed deliveries, damaged items), for businesses (unsustainable costs for delivery) and for society and the environment (traffic congestion, pollution).
To solve this, Eliport is creating a fleet of AUTONOMOUS ground-based ROBOTS. They will travel in pedestrian spaces in order to cover the distance between the pick-up point (e.g final logistics point) and the drop-off point (e.g the customer’s home). The robot will be intelligent because software will allow it to do its delivery duties, orient in the environment and be a smart participant in human traffic.
We are also developing a delivery receptacle. This trunk or gate system will be installed at/in customer’s premises and will only be accessible to Eliport autonomous robots, the intended recipient of the delivery or somebody with a unique code for each trunk/gate (e.g courier, mailman). With this PATENT-PENDING delivery system we are aiming to completely remove the human from the delivery process.
The ELIPORT system has many different potential use cases that vary in technical difficulty: limited open environments such as gated communities, closed industrial environments like warehouses and factories, public industrial environments such as airports and hospitals and finally fully open environments like typical suburban or urban residences. The first target market will be gated-communities in the EU and USA that contain primary residences.
The feasibility will determines three key requirements for further project execution: i) if the market conditions favor ELIPORT, ii) if the solution has reached the maturity needed to proceed to further product development and iii) if the company has the necessary resources to move on to the next phase.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- social sciencessociologyindustrial relationsautomation
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringroboticsautonomous robots
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-1
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
08009 BARCELONA
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.