Autonomous vehicles (AV) play an increasingly important role in food and parcel deliveries. In early December, Silicon Valley-based startup Nuro announced that it was launching the first commercial autonomous delivery in California. Partnering with 7-Eleven, the company provides the service for residents of Mountain View, where the business is located. According to a blog post from Nuro's co-founder Zhu Jiajun, customers can access the autonomous delivery through 7-Eleven's 7NOW delivery app. Nuro currently offers the service with its Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, expecting to replace them with its R2 autonomous cars later.

Convenience stores across Colorado will soon roll-out cannabidiol dispensing robots for patrons to purchase products via a touchscreen and in under three minutes. Boulder and Denver are the first cities to receive the CBD-dispensing robots, which were designed to also entertain and educate customers on the benefits of the cannabis-based products. CBD, or cannabidiol, is certainly trendy right now, and its sellers insist it may be very useful in treating things like pain, anxiety and epilepsy. The AI-powered robots were developed by Greenbox Robotics and allow consumers to purchase products via a touchscreen – saving them a trip to the dispensary. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) are both derived from the cannabis plant.

This article was co-written by Chris Davis and Brandon Metzger. From detailed homework review to back office automation, progress in artificial intelligence will continue to explode in the year ahead. In 2018, Metis Strategy interviewed nearly 40 CIOs, CDOs and CTOs of companies with over $1 billion in revenue as part of our Technovation podcast and column. When asked to identify the emerging technologies that are of growing interest or are making their way onto their 2019 roadmap, 75 percent of the technology leaders highlighted artificial intelligence, while 40 percent said blockchain and 13 percent cited the Internet of Things. AI, an umbrella term for technologies that enable machines to accomplish tasks that previously required human intelligence, could rapidly upend the competitive landscape across industries.

The convenience store giant will adopt facial and gesture recognition and behavior analysis at the chain's 11,000 Thai stores. Through a partnership with AI provider Remark Holdings, 7-Eleven will use facial and gesture recognition to collect and analyze data points on traffic in stores, staff activities, how long customers linger at specific shelves, as well as their emotions as they pass through stores, the report said. It can also identify members of 7-Eleven's loyalty program, allowing managers to single them out for promotions. Soopakij Chearavanont, chairman of Charoen Pokphand (CP), which operates the retailer, said in the report that the technology would help the chain drive revenues, cuts costs and improve margins. To read more, click here.

Whatever Americans think about drones filling the big blue skies of these United States, the president is jazzed about the idea of increasing air traffic--and he's working to make it happen. On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed a memo directing the Department of Transportation to create a plan to make it easier to fly a drone for commercial purposes in US airspace. Other countries have pushed ahead with national drone networks, and professional operators in the US have longed yearned to follow them up, up, and away. To that end, the feds are indulging them with a new effort: the Unmanned Aircraft System Integration Pilot Program. This new initiative will likely excite companies like Amazon and 7-Eleven, but this is bigger than getting quick delivery of Soylent or Slurpees.

President Trump and Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program today -- an initiative aimed at exploring expanded use of drones. While the Obama administration began allowing some drone activity to take place in US airspace, a fair amount of restrictions were still applicable. This new program, however, will allow companies and local governments to use drones in ways that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) currently doesn't allow. That includes "beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights, nighttime operations, and flights over people," as White House advisor Michael Kratsios said today. "This program supports the President's commitment to foster technological innovation that will be a catalyst for ideas that have the potential to change our day-to-day lives. Drones are proving to be especially valuable in emergency situations, including assessing damage from natural disasters such as the recent hurricanes and the wildfires in California," Secretary Chao said in a statement.

Mike Toscano, the former president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, emphatically declared at the September RobotLab forum that "anyone who claims to know the future of the [robotics] industry is lying, I mean no one could've predicted the computing mobile revolution." These words acted as a guiding principle when walking around RoboBusiness in Silicon Valley last week. The many keynotes, pitches and exhibits in the Santa Clara Convention Center had the buzz of an industry racing towards mass adoption, similar to the early days of personal computing. The inflection point in the invention that changed the world, the PC, was 1995. During that year, Sun Microsystems released Java to developers with promise of "write once, publish anywhere," followed weeks later by Microsoft's consumer software package, Windows '95.

If your image of the future of drone deliveries involves swarms of quadcopters pouring out of Amazon warehouses like flying monkeys leaving the Wicked Witch's castle, you'll be disappointed. They're far more likely to be dispatched from trucks parked not too far from your house. Anything else is simply too big a hassle. Companies like UPS and Amazon prize efficiency above all, and deploying a fleet of drones from a warehouse in the middle of nowhere wastes time. Making them fly all the way back wastes energy.

US drone delivery service Flirtey on Monday announced that its self-piloting flying machines have whisked flu medicine, hot food and more from 7-Eleven convenience stores to customers' homes. The Nevada-based company boasted of being the first drone service to complete regular commercial deliveries to residences in this country, having completed 77 such autonomous missions. "We have now successfully completed the first month of routine commercial drone deliveries to customer homes in partnership with 7-Eleven," Flirtey chief executive Matthew Sweeny said in a release. "This is a giant leap towards a future where everyone can experience the convenience of Flirtey's instant store-to-door drone delivery." Flirtey said it made 77 drone deliveries to homes of select customers on weekends in November, filling orders placed using a special application.

Sure, Amazon made its first drone delivery last week, but 7-Eleven already has it beat. Today, the convenience store company announced that it has already made a total of 77 deliveries by drone in the state of Nevada. Of course the caveat here is that 7-Eleven relied on Flirtey, a drone delivery service company that's already made a name for itself by delivering Domino's in New Zealand and textbooks in Australia. It also made the first FAA-approved urban drone delivery earlier this year. Though the deliveries kicked off in July, it was in November when the company started making regular weekend deliveries from a 7-Eleven store to about a dozen customers.