Insider Brief
- Coco Robotics appointed UCLA professor and highly cited AI researcher Bolei Zhou as Chief AI Scientist to lead a new Physical AI Lab advancing fleet performance.
- The lab will convert data from thousands of daily sidewalk deliveries into deployable advances in simulation, neural rendering, generative AI, and reinforcement learning to improve adaptation across diverse cities.
- Coco says its unique urban-robotics dataset underpins plans to scale to 10,000+ robots in 2026, accelerating safe, reliable autonomous delivery.
PRESS RELEASE – Coco Robotics, the leader in autonomous delivery, today named Bolei Zhou, one of the world’s most cited AI researchers, as Chief AI Scientist. Zhou will spearhead Coco’s new Physical AI Lab, leading a team of engineers to transform insights from thousands of robots navigating city streets every day into actionable AI breakthroughs that build on Coco’s commitment to speed, safety, and reliability.
Expanding upon Coco’s existing autonomous capabilities, Zhou will lead engineers and researchers in advancing the fleet’s performance, enabling thousands of robots to adapt to new cities with distinct layouts, traffic, and infrastructure. The lab also serves as a proving ground where the team tackles complex urban robotics challenges and rapidly deploys innovations across the fleet, directly shaping the next generation of robots.
Zhou , a professor at UCLA, is a leading figure in AI and robotics. With over 60,000 citations, he has received prestigious awards including the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, and MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovators Under 35. Zhou is renowned for his work in autonomous driving simulation, notably leading the NSF-funded effort to develop MetaDriverse, an open-source platform that enables realistic driving and sidewalk simulations for AI research. Zhou’s latest research brings together advances in simulation, neural rendering, generative AI, and reinforcement learning – amplified by the power of foundation models – to push forward the frontier of embodied AI. His research has been presented at the world’s most prestigious AI and computer vision conferences – including NeurIPS, ICCV, ICML, and CVPR – with more than 100 publications that underscore his leadership in advancing computer vision, autonomous driving, and robotics.
“As a researcher, I’ve spent my academic career advancing the science of AI and robotics,” said Zhou. “Coco offers something rare: one of the world’s largest robot fleets. By harnessing it, we can build AI systems that don’t just work in theory, but thrive in the complex, unpredictable conditions of city streets, accelerating Coco’s growth and setting a new standard for autonomous delivery worldwide.”
To date, Coco has built the largest dataset of robots interacting on city sidewalks, providing the foundation for advancing physical AI systems. Every day, Coco’s robots encounter thousands of unpredictable scenarios across U.S. and European cities – from temporary construction and weather shifts to stray objects and unpredictable pedestrian and animal movements. This creates exactly the kind of data AI needs to learn from and improve.
This unique dataset accelerates Coco’s path to building the world’s largest autonomous delivery fleet. In 2026, Coco plans to expand its fleet to more than 10,000 robots, applying these research-driven advancements across millions of miles of urban deliveries.
“We’re creating an environment where scientists and engineers can push the limits of robotics and AI, turning research developments into real-world applications across our fleet,” said Zach Rash, CEO of Coco Robotics. “With Zhou joining as Chief AI Scientist, we’re not just advancing our AI, we’re creating the foundation for the world’s largest autonomous delivery fleet, and reimagining how goods move through cities everywhere.”
