What does the future look like to a company that wants to build sprawling underground pipe networks and staff them with little self-driving, tote-lugging robots? Imagine it’s late in the evening. You’ve been debugging code for hours, need to hit a tight deadline, and have an almost pathological craving for Taco Bell (many such cases). The delivery of your Crunchwrap Supreme, however, no longer involves ludicrously expensive burrito limousines or any other version of a human-operated, three-thousand-pound vehicle trundling through the streets. You place your order and continue working. Seven minutes later, your meal miraculously appears inside a drawer in your apartment. Cups of coffee, groceries, package deliveries, party outfits, power tools, and all sorts of other physical objects are also accessible to you via this drawer (in under 10 minutes and for sub-25-cent delivery costs). Need to return an Amazon item? The trick works both ways — just place your box in the drawer and consider it done.

How could such a utility possibly exist in the near future? While it may seem like teleportation, it’s actually something much simpler: a “thing pipe.” Today, Pipedream Labs — a hyperlogistics company building underground tunnel networks populated by autonomous delivery robots — is announcing its first-ever Rapid Fulfillment Center (RFC) in Austin, Texas. The RFC is a warehouse custom-fitted to Pipedream’s systems, optimized for picking-and-packing speed and the scaling of autonomous processes. Initially, this warehouse will be connected to four “Portals” — unmanned pickup kiosks outside of the RFC — where items are elevatored up from the underground delivery pipes. This marks the groundbreaking of Pipedream’s eventual wider-reaching network of pipes (40 miles) and Portals (100 of them) that will deliver burritos, toilet paper, and whatever else the citizens of Austin want (and probably currently order on DoorDash). In tandem, the company is also announcing the formation of Goods, its grocery retail ghost brand, which will live within the Austin RFC and serve as its anchor customer.

I spoke with Garrett Scott, CEO of Pipedream Labs, about all of this (and more) to learn about his vision for the future of on-demand delivery via underground tubes.

Pipedream Labs aims to eventually do for physical goods what the internet has done for data: To create a “cloud,” populated with all sorts of physical objects, whose contents are cheaply downloadable to your location at incredible speeds. Pipedream’s approach to achieving “hyperlogistics,” as Garrett calls it, consists of two main components: underground pipes and above-ground “Portals.” These pipes, 24 inches in diameter and built with the same materials used for water mains, are filled with a network of autonomous electric robots. These robots, dubbed “Otters,” travel 100mph on intra-pipe rails and carry payloads of up to 40 pounds in standardized warehousing totes. The pipes are almost always built in loops so that Otters can run unidirectionally, maintaining constant flow within the system. Because Pipedream’s setup is electric and underground, it’s not directly impacted by weather, and its emissions are minimal. Those hordes of DoorDash, UPS, and Amazon trucks clogging up the roads, wearing down public infrastructure, and polluting the air with exhaust fumes? Many of their routes will become obsolete, and we will need far fewer of them. Some estimates indicate that 30 percent of urban traffic is the result of last-mile delivery vehicles.

The above-ground Portals, four of which will be constructed directly outside of the Austin RFC in its parking lot, connect directly to the pipe system and allow people to easily pick up their items. Portals can take the form of either “Portal stores,” 650-square-foot installations that Garrett referred to as impossibly small “mini-malls,” or standalone kiosk-like structures that look similar to drive-up ATMs. Pickup from any Portal on the Pipedream network will cost on the order of 25 to 50 cents.

Eventually, variations of these Portals will be installed directly within apartment complexes (and within homes, as per the earlier Taco-Bell-drawer example). Any business whose supply of goods is connected to the network of pipes will be able to immediately expand its distribution footprint. Local coffee shops, for example, may suddenly be able to better compete with the ubiquity of Starbucks — you’re likely going to be picking both of them up from the same Portal. The Austin RFC, and Goods, will be a proving ground for these features. Garrett wants to “run head-first into the walls” of inevitable problems that come with reimagining logistics on both the supplier (Goods, retailers) and provider (Pipedream’s delivery and pickup systems) sides. The Austin RFC’s physical systems will become like an API for suppliers: any company can send its inventory to the warehouse and instantly access the full network. Even local suppliers with single SKUs, like a farmer who sells home-crafted jam, will have the ability to tap into Pipedream’s infrastructure and offer one-minute pickup at any available Portal. Garrett says bedroom coders could eventually develop front-end applications which leverage existing RFC inventory, allowing them to create a new sort of pseudo-dropshipping (e.g. a ghost hardware store with no physical footprint, RFC-provided products, and all-Portal pickup).

Beyond the initial fulfillment center, Goods brand, and longer-term middle-mile pipe network buildout, Pipedream is also scaling up manufacturing for its “instant pickup” systems, which deliver food directly from restaurant kitchens to customers’ vehicles outside using customized Portal setups. The company has already installed a live system at an undisclosed restaurant chain and “has a bunch of orders” (dozens) from other locations.

If current plans hold, the Austin network will span 40 miles of pipe and over 100 Portal nodes. Every Portal will have access to the entire network, meaning that any item from anywhere in the city can be delivered in under 15 minutes. The new Austin RFC, the first supply center on the network, will begin operations sometime in September. While it will initially be staffed with human pick-and-pack operators that sort inventory and load the Otter bots, everything is being custom-built to facilitate the transition to full autonomy.

Autonomous logistics isn’t just inevitable — it’s an instrumental piece of the near future. Self-driving eighteen-wheelers, drones, sidewalk and bike lane robots, and underground pipe systems will help solve the critical cost and efficiency problems of middle-mile and last-mile delivery. Even for goods produced overseas, for example, the last mile accounts for between 30 and 50 percent of total transportation expenses. It requires bespoke interaction between humans, mailrooms, and mailboxes. Autonomous logistics will have to find ways to both cover longer distances cheaply and get in and out of buildings reliably and quickly. Pipedream is solving both of these problems. Its underground pipe networks will cover longer, middle-mile scenarios like moving things between warehouses and deliver directly into houses and apartment complexes. Beyond this, the company’s modular system can easily hand off items to drones, which will eventually pick up deliveries from Portals and fly them to people’s doors, reducing cost and maximizing the utility of each drone.

Garrett recognizes that drones will be a major part of the future of autonomous logistics, and he’s pumped about it. Though he’s previously said one of the only reasons he didn’t start a drone delivery company is because he believes drone services will become heavily commoditized after breaking through the initial regulatory and scale barriers, he told me, “I think I’ve changed my mind about that.” “Honestly, Zipline’s [a drone company] delivery experience is phenomenal. And frankly, I did not see that coming — that is a differentiator.” By taking “humans fully out of the loop” and using Portal nodes to optimize drone-dropoff routes, Garrett thinks we will be able to eventually get “50 cent drone deliveries.” (Right now, drone deliveries are limited in scale and typically slightly more expensive than DoorDash equivalents.)

Garrett knows Pipedream needs to “nail [the intra-warehouse logistics] with humans in the loop first” in order to make the transition to full automation in stages and figure out the most efficient way of constructing the pipe-compatible system. Part of this also comes from Garrett’s insistence that the customer experience must be great from day zero: The early goal for the RFC is to ensure orders can be picked and packed in under three minutes and delivered to the Portal (and picked up by the customer) in under two minutes max (with a typical one-minute timeline). For orders picked up from one of the Portals by a drone, Garrett says the early system will “get [the order] into that drone and get it in the air in 3-4 minutes.” He hinted at a yet-unannounced partnership with one or more drone delivery companies, but was not at liberty to provide details.

Every technology that interfaces with the physical world comes with the nagging, often onerous, burden of regulation. Since the network’s underground pipes are constructed with the same materials as water mains, and because trenchless installation techniques like Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) now allow underground installation with minimal surface disruption, Garrett says that they’re “not creating a new regulatory path” for the pipes themselves. “We’re going down a [path] that already exists,” he tells me. They can also install new Portals and pipes systems in a matter of days — the Austin RFC’s pipes and Portals apparatus, for example, has a sub-one-week construction window.

Garrett points out that Pipedream’s system is “only novel in the aggregate,” noting that “every individual piece is kind of stupid simple.” But even the combination of two known factors is enough novelty to spook some regulators. “You go to people who put in underground infrastructure, they’re like ‘here’s the process, we permit underground all day. It’s not a big deal, but you’ll never get the robots in there.’” He then said that the “robot people,” of course, say the reverse: the Otter doesn’t make them bat an eye, but “you’ll never get those pipes in the ground.” The truth is, yes, it’s all possible, but the real challenge is consumer buy-in — restaurants, grocers, landlords, and homeowners must decide to integrate (and get someone to foot the installation bill). The idea is that forward-looking cities like Austin will end up benefiting greatly from early implementation of the tubes. Top talent will want to live in a city with five-minute delivery, not two-day delivery.

Right now, next-day delivery feels to Garrett, and many of us, like a miracle. Amazon’s two-day Prime delivery service changed the way many Americans live their daily lives: we structure our lives around faster access to everything (without going to the store to shop). In the future, when hyperlogistics is dominant, we’ll realize “next-day delivery is kind of crazy long; it’s forever!” Not only will modalities like drones and underground pipe systems give us 10-minute, sub-25-cent delivery benchmarks for a huge variety of goods, this logistics shift will create entirely new economies. When the costs are “close to zero,” Garrett asserts, people will use these systems “10, 20, 30 times a day — we want objects to move like data.” And when you have that kind of scale, Garrett thinks “closed rental systems are going to make bank.” We will access higher-quality products for less money, because anything commoditized will not need to be owned. Keep a base wardrobe and get additional items as needed, on-demand, and then return them via your nearest Portal. Power drills and tennis racquets? Summon, use, and return. The bidirectional nature of the service also makes the laundry loop seem inevitable: dirty clothes out, fresh ones back in. And, on a peer-to-peer level, with double-verification and company intermediaries, everything you own can easily become an income-producing, rentable asset.

This is also a future in which Davids are better able to compete with Goliaths. Local farms can reduce the cost deltas between their bespoke products and internationally produced, commodified factory items. When the cost of last-mile delivery is negated, ceteris paribus, local goods approach cost parity with foreign goods (since the latter still needs to be shipped across the planet). If the neighborhood farm can put your bag of apples into a micro-fulfillment-center Portal and get it directly to you for pennies, that is a game changer (for them and for you). Flourishing local economies are a key element of this future. And, for typical groceries, all of your food will become fresher. Instead of stocking up a few times per month, you can make more frequent one-minute pit stops to Portals. Eventually, groceries will be sent directly into your home, as often as you like, for negligible cost.

Garrett also thinks hyperlogistics might usher in an era of industrial 3D printing that becomes even stranger than having instant access to all existing goods. He imagines “these weird dropshippers, where their only job is to sell a file [for a 3D printer]… and it gets printed two miles from [the buyer’s] house and sent to them… it’s just like a file that gets executed right when someone orders it.”

In this future, where every home has a “thing pipe,” goods that don’t even exist in the physical world yet can appear out of what seems like thin air. Retail spaces shrink even further, opening up room to use land instead as housing, green space, a warehouse for the sculpting of the next Statue of David, zero-gravity training installations, or literally anything else that provides more societal utility than a vestigial Kroger. Streets will reclaimed for pedestrians, bikes, and non-commercial drivers, as pipes and drones crowd out the need for delivery trucks and DoorDashers. The obsolescence of these driving jobs also represents a potential human capital unlock for higher-value work.

The ability to rent high-quality goods means people are able to live better on lower incomes. Vehicle emissions are reduced, small brands and neighborhood businesses are able to compete with ubiquitous brands on footprint, and underground pipe systems provide a backbone for weather-related disaster relief. Porch theft will be a thing of the past, and you will be able to get an in-mug latte from your local coffee shop even when you don’t have time to leave the house. When atoms start moving around like bits, and pipe delivery is as common as Wi-Fi, we’ll wonder how we ever lived without it.

The announcement of Pipedream’s first RFC, the start of a larger network implementation in Austin, and the creation of Goods, a hyperlogistics-first retail grocery brand, are the beginning of this potentially world-changing technological deployment. We may never get actual teleportation, but pipes and robots might get us damn close.

— G. B. Rango