AutoX Inc., an obscure self-driving car startup with offices in China and Silicon Valley, has launched a pilot autonomous vehicle food delivery service in San Jose, California, in what’s being claimed to be a first.

The pilot program will initially be limited to an area of about 400 homes in north San Jose using two vehicles with L4 autonomous capability, though the company aims to expand the pilot to Mountain View and Palo Alto in the future.

Food for the service comes through a partnership with GrubMarket.com, a San Francisco-based healthy-food delivery service. Customers in the pilot program can order food online and have it delivered or buy food from the vehicles from a selection of goods stocked in each. The groceries are kept in a temperature-controlled environment in the car to keep them fresh.

“Last-mile delivery for groceries and food will be more convenient and affordable when enabled by autonomous driving technology,” the company explained in a post on Medium. “The traditional way of grocery shopping is tedious. We are bringing a new way of grocery shopping to free people to enjoy the best part  —  receiving the goods, and enjoying our purchases.”

The technology behind the vehicles is interesting only in that it’s a more bare-bones application of autonomous vehicle technology that relies on inexpensive cameras and artificial intelligence for the grunt work, rather than the laser arrays and sophisticated sensors used by other autonomous vehicle startups.

The company itself was founded in September 2016 by Jianxiong Xiao, known by the nickname of “Professor X.” According to his bio, he has spent more than 10 years of research and engineering experience in computer vision, autonomous driving and robotics along while earning a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology along the way. Prior to founding AutoX, Xiao was an assistant professor at Princeton University and the founding director of the Princeton Computer Vision and Robotics Labs.

According to TechCrunch, AutoX has raised $43 million from strategic and financial investors.

Like Uber in ride-hailing, AutoX believes that autonomous vehicles will replace drivers for food deliveries in the future. Xiao isn’t shy with his predictions either, saying that he believes it will take only one or two years to commercialize unmanned delivery in some locations.

Photo: AutoX