How Kiwi uses Airtable to build robots
Kiwi is building the largest robotic infrastructure in the world. From our very first delivery in March 2017, Kiwi has fulfilled over 38'000 orders, built over 150 robots, and now has robots rolling around in over 12 cities.
Kiwibots make hundreds of deliveries a day using friendly robots that mesh within the fabric of our sidewalks. All of this wouldn’t be possible without effective coordination and collaboration throughout the entire company. Thanks to Airtable, Kiwi is able to manage and deploy robots as well as keep tabs on what needs to be done.
One of our biggest fans of Airtable is the maintenance team: they make sure all of our robots are in working order, and ready for deliveries. They have our ‘Purple Book’, a.k.a our master list of all the robots, open all day in the office.
From the moment our robots passes QA out of the factory, they are tracked through our Purple Book. Every deployment, issue, battery change and maintenance action is thoroughly noted down. You can even click on a link and see the live stats of each robot out in the field, which can provide invaluable data to debug.
A lot of people ask why we opted for an Airtable instead of building our own tool to manage robots. Wouldn’t it make sense for a company to have their own platform to manage one of the most important assets? Well, it turns out it’s actually easier to build an application on top of Airtable than to build it from scratch.
We actually tried — several times — to build our own tool. Every time we had requirements set forth by the maintenance team, our software team would build and ship a maintenance tool. The maintenance team would fiddle around with it, find some bugs or suggestions for improvements, and then send them back to the software team. The software team would then put it into their backlog, and prioritize.
Since Kiwi is focused on building a product that people love, most of the software team’s effort went into polishing our consumer app and making sure that our server wasn’t on fire. This left little time for the maintenance tool, and led to frustrations on both sides. So the maintenance team took things into their own hands, and prototyped their own tool with Airtable.
It turns out that by removing the layers of management and communication between those who use tools and those who build tools, you’re able to make the perfect tool for the job. Kiwi’s maintenance team iterated over the course of a few months, changing the data structure and shaping what we log (and when). What started off as a simple table noting the state of each robot has evolved into a complex interconnected and smart tool which has allowed us to scale to 12 cities.
