Uber Eats Partners with Cartken, Mitsubishi for Robot Deliveries in Japan

Uber has joined hands with robotics firm Cartken and Japanese industrial titan Mitsubishi Electric to launch autonomous sidewalk robots to deliver Eats orders in parts of Tokyo starting March.

With this, Japan will become the first international market to have autonomous delivery available on the Uber Eats platform. 

Cartken’s Model C robots will be delivering the food and navigating the sidewalks of Tokyo, and the operations will be supervised by Mitsubishi Electric as part of the partnership.

Cartken’s Model C robots use AI and computer vision technologies to navigate their environments.

According to reports, Uber Eats and Cartken first partnered in parts of Miami in 2022, and expanded robot delivery to Fairfax, Virginia in 2023.

Shoji Tanaka, the senior general manager of the Advanced Application Development Center, Development Division at Mitsubishi Electric said in a statement that robot delivery services “is considered to be an effective countermeasure to the logistics crisis that will become more serious in the future.”

Tanaka also mentioned that Mitsubishi has been working with Cartken to “respond to such social issues.”

“We hope that this newly announced initiative will serve as a catalyst for the spread of robot delivery services in Japan,” he added.