Rakuten Doubles Tokyo Autonomous Delivery Fleet to 10 Robots

Rakuten Group has expanded its autonomous sidewalk delivery fleet in eastern Tokyo, targeting 24,000 households across the Harumi, Tsukishima, and Kachidoki districts. The Japanese group is doubling its deployment of US-built Avride delivery robots to 10 units after launching the commercial run in November 2024.

The service connects more than 90 drop-off points to local merchants, including Starbucks, FamilyMart, Yoshinoya, and Supermarket Bunkado. Each cart carries one order per trip inside a 54-liter cargo hold, twice the volume of earlier testing units. They run for up to 12 hours on a 3.5-hour charge, navigating at speeds capped by Japanese law at 6 kilometers per hour.

Sidewalk Hardware and Route Rules

Avride builds the hardware with light detection and ranging sensors alongside ultrasonic arrays, allowing navigation at night and in rainfall up to 20 millimeters per hour. Operations pause during heavier storms, snow, or high winds. Japanese transport regulations require off-site human overseers to monitor the machines remotely, though operators do not need to walk alongside them on the pavement.

Integrating different property access points and door locks remains the main operational hurdle for sidewalk robotics in dense Asian cities. Rakuten uses custom unlocking instructions tailored to individual apartment complexes to let buyers retrieve parcels from the cargo bay.

Expanding Beyond Food Orders

Japan’s food delivery sector reached 800 billion yen ($5.41 billion) in 2024, but acute courier shortages and tightening overtime limits on drivers are forcing platform operators to automate ground transport. While automated carts still handle a sliver of Rakuten’s total volume, the group is setting up the software routing engine to support mixed fleets across commercial hubs.

Rakuten plans to test the 10-robot fleet on business-to-business shipments and prescription pharmaceuticals once domestic retail operations stabilize across the initial three Tokyo neighborhoods.