An Italian team has built a prototype robot they call Dustbot which is aimed (in a backwards way) at the deliverbot vision.

The goal of the dustbot is to travel on demand to houses through the narrow, pedestrian streets of European cities so people can give the robot their trash, which it then takes back to the dump and drops there. It does not automate the pickup of the trash -- you have to be there and put your bag into it, though it is able to drop it on it own. It is not clear if they plan to have it operate on streets with cars, or if it is truly ready to wander with civilians.

This is an evolutionary extension of the already common delivery robots used in factory floors and in hospitals. The hospital robots interact with the general public, and do it simply by being so slow that impact or injury is very unlikely, even with a programming error. But looking at the market of the very narrow, mostly or all-pedestrian ancient urban street, the challenge is more difficult than a hospital, but not as difficult as a vehicle that has to go fast enough that it could hurt somebody.

In tune with my predictions about deliverbots, the key is that the robot does not have to be in a hurry, so it can go as slow as is necessary to be safe. As the system improves, that speed gets faster and faster until it's practical to go on urban streets at 15mph (ducking out of the way of cars) and eventually at the same speed as the cars. This robot can also be limited to a specific area in which it is well tested and armed with accurate data, because that's much less of a restriction on delivery robots than it is on cars. (If you need to deliver elsewhere, use another service -- but people will resist a taxi that will only take them certain places.)

Dustbot is probably too slow right now to be economical, particularly because you must wait for it. A robot that can pick up a standardized container is not too hard, however. One nice advantage of working on the trash problem is that there is no issue in leaving it on the street, so you don't need to arrange home access for deliveries as a deliverbot would. There's also little risk of piracy of the cargo, or damaging it.

There's lots of video and photos on the site, here is a fluffy BBC video about the Dustbot. Note that this is about a year old -- I just had not heard of it until recently.