Coco Robotics taps UCLA professor to lead new physical AI research lab

Coco Robotics, a startup specializing in last-mile delivery robots, has established a new physical AI research lab led by UCLA professor Zhou, who has also joined the company as chief AI scientist. The move aims to leverage the extensive data—spanning millions of miles collected over five years in complex urban environments—to advance autonomous operation of their delivery bots and reduce delivery costs. Coco Robotics co-founder and CEO Zach Rash emphasized that the company now has sufficient data scale to accelerate research in physical AI, particularly in robot navigation and reinforcement learning, areas where Zhou is a leading expert. The new research lab operates independently from Coco Robotics’ partnership with OpenAI, which provides access to language models, while the lab focuses on utilizing the company’s proprietary robot-collected data. Coco Robotics plans to use the insights gained exclusively to enhance its own automation capabilities and improve the efficiency of its local robot models, rather than selling the data. Additionally, the company intends to share relevant research findings with the cities where it operates to help address