Autonomous Delivery

KAUST Smart and Community Life are excited to invite community members to experience and shape the future of package and food deliveries through multiple autonomous delivery pilots.

These pilots are being carried out jointly between KAUST Smart and The National Digital Transformation Unit (NDU) to exchange knowledge and expertise in digital transformation and emerging technologies

Together, KAUST Smart, NDU, Community Life, and various industry and technology partners have come together to launch and test autonomous delivery by running two pilots:

Self-driving vehicle for package delivery
Drones for food delivery

Partnership between

KAUST Smart and NDU

KAUST and NDU recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aimed at conducting joint projects in digital transformation that contribute to realizing Vision 2030 and enable digital adoption it in the Kingdom. NDU regards this collaboration with KAUST as strategic for achieving its vision, especially since KAUST provides a unique environment as a living lab that allows advanced technologies and concepts to be tested before launching it in other cities and locations.

New way to receive your food

There are many advantages to using drones for delivery including improved logistics efficiency, saving cost, reducing pollution, and providing services to underdeveloped areas. We will be leveraging the KAUST living lab to test this technology and learn from it.

Second phase of the pilot

Drone delivery pilot aims at testing and experimenting the use of drones to deliver packages and food. In the first phase of the pilot, we tested delivery of food to a number of villas using a carpet to carpet scenario. In this scenario, a carpet was placed at the Discovery Square and another one at residential units. The pilot was running from October 2021 to January 2022.

We are now ready to launch the second phase of the pilot. The scope of this phase is Oasis Residential area with a focus on hub to hub scenario. Please see the video below for more information.

Globally, consumer behavior has changed significantly with an increase in online shopping and contactless services. This pilot aims to leverage KAUST as an ideal living lab for testing new package delivery solutions using a self-driving vehicle, called UNO.

This pilot is extended to include additional households covering the Island residential area. The residents will receive further communication to provide more information. The residents will interact with the vehicle via SMS and the touchscreen user interface on the vehicle.