Robots have been delivering essential food items to residents of Milton Keynes and Southampton during the pandemic
Founded by Starships in 2014, the robots began commercial deliveries to paying customers in 2018.
Aimed primarily at urgent and essential deliveries, these robots pick up your food from the supermarket and then make its way (slowly) and very carefully to your house. This allows you to go about your day without having to worry about popping to the shops to get some milk. It came into its own during the pandemic, and passed its 1,000,000 delivery milestone whilst delivering to people who are stuck inside.
The robot replaces a human driver vehicle which would alternatively make the delivery. Each robot takes a car off the road, and replaces it with a robot NOT on the road as they use pavements to drive on. This reduces road use, energy consumption, congestion and safety risks experienced whilst driving on roads.
Robotic transportation promises much lower cost as well as safety and low energy use. Food and grocery delivery with delivery drivers has become particularly expensive recently. Customers may not know it, but the various food orders and delivery companies like UberEats and Deliveroo don’t just charge the relatively small delivery fee, they also take 20-30% of the price of the meal from the restaurant.
Many restaurants have ended up just increasing their prices by some or all of that amount, because they can’t afford that much loss of margin. Often, a tip is added because the driver is not getting enough of this margin. In spite of all this, delivery of low cost baskets is not sufficiently profitable. Low cost robots offer the potential to greatly reduce these added costs — and they usually don’t take tips. (You may laugh, but people do sometimes try to tip delivery robots.)
Starship’s initial market was campuses such as universities and colleges, which feature a population that loves to order out and often doesn’t own cars. They’re also cheap and love the lower cost of robot delivery. The pandemic closed many campuses for a temporary period, but created a boost of demand for no-human delivery in cities.
Starships is currently operating in only a few countries, but plans to grow int the future, and you can hope to have a robot delivering your groceries to you soon.
Courtesy: Forbes
Some have had their criticisms — San Francisco effectively banned such robots over fears of traffic on the sidewalks, but there are many areas with very lightly used sidewalks where this is not an issue. The robots are also well liked by people with disabilities who can’t easily walk or drive to stores and want them to be allowed. Almost all other cities have been very receptive.
Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the pavements.
Starship robots are small and light and so inherently much less dangerous — even if one were to hit something or somebody, the risk of damage and injury is extremely small.
In addition to pavements, the robots are also doing 50,000 street crossings per day.
Again, the easier problem helps a sidewalk robot deliver such a result. Sidewalk robots such as Starship’s can stop in 30cm when they encounter a problem. They can then call upon a remote operations centre for non-autonomous strategic help. The remote operators do not typically “remote drive” the robots at Starship instead they give strategic directions about where to drive when autonomy is restored.
Again, the problem is easier because of the ability to stop, though at the same time pavements are actually quite chaotic environments, with pedestrians, pets, scooters, trees, trash-cans, debris and many items not often seen on the roads.
With over one million happy robotic delivery customers served it looks like this is one idea that is truly pandemic proof.
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