If Matt Johnson-Roberson ever wondered why so many autonomous vehicle developers do their testing in Arizona, he got a fuller understanding last winter, riding around Michigan on a tandem tricycle. Sitting side by side and bundled up to ward off the cold, he and his University of Michigan colleague Ram Vasudevan pedaled to keep up with their robot, which was plying the streets of Ann Arbor on its own. One handled the steering while the other worked the laptop that oversaw the REV-1, the autonomous vehicle they created to mimic human bike messengers.

Alex Davies covers autonomous vehicles and other transportation machines for WIRED.

Johnson-Roberson and Vasudevan, who jointly direct the University of Michigan and Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles, cofounded Refraction AI, the latest self-driving outfit to announce plans to change the way people and their things move about the planet. While a juggernaut like Waymo can take on everything from robotaxis to trucking, this 11-person startup is focused on the local food-delivery market. “Trying every­thing would be a death sentence,” Johnson-Roberson says.

He has been making robots since 2003, when, as an under­graduate at Carnegie Mellon, he worked on the first Darpa Grand Challenge, a seminal event in the self-driving space. Sixteen years on, with self-driving vehicles still struggling to enter commercial service, he’s eager to see robots have a real role in the world, beyond the Roomba that vacuums his house. “It feels like a bummer that we don’t have anything,” he says.

So Refraction, which came out of stealth mode last week, will avoid the hard parts of driving by acting not like a car, but like a bicycle. The three-wheeled REV-1 is 4 feet tall and 32 inches wide, about the profile of an adult on a bike. It uses bike lanes where available (which should be most of the dense urban areas Refraction has in mind) and hugs the shoulder everywhere else. That confers a few advantages. At just 100 pounds (not counting cargo) and driving at 10 to 12 mph, it can stop in about 5 feet, reducing the need to spot obstacles hundreds of feet ahead and mitigating the damage of any crash. (A prototype hit Johnson-Roberson a few times in his lab, and he walked away unharmed.) That lets the REV-1 get around with a relatively modest and inexpensive sensor suite. It has a pair of solid-state lidar scanners but relies more heavily on readily available radar and cameras than many bigger AVs. It also uses ultrasonic sensors (the ones that beep when you’re about to back your car into a lamp post), whose limited range isn’t a problem here.

Keeping the REV-1 to low speeds and out of the way of cars should help Refraction move to market. It’s now working with two Ann Arbor restaurants, making deliveries to the startup’s employees and hoping to expand to the general public in the coming months. To make that happen, Johnson-Roberson and Vasudevan have a teleoperation setup that lets them control the vehicle remotely, using a system designed for a racing videogame. When one of their five REV-1s encounters an unprotected left turn, someone at the office will take over and handle it manually (the vehicle can also make three right turns to avoid the left).

Same goes for zebra crossings, where pedestrians have the right of way and there’s no light to control traffic. These are complex situations, and Refraction’s cofounders don’t want to take the time to solve them completely before getting to work. “It feels years off,” Johnson-Roberson says. After all, reports have said that Waymo, which has been at this tech longer than anyone, still has trouble with unprotected lefts, while Cruise boasted with a May video of its cars handling the turns.