Starship delivery robots getting ready to deliver in London, Germany, Bern

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Today at Starship, we announced our first pilot projects for robotic delivery which will begin operating this summer. We'll be working with a London food delivery startup Pronto as well as German parcel company Hermes and the Metro Group of retailers, plus Just Eat restaurant food delivery to trial on-your-schedule delivery of packages, groceries and meals to people's homes.

(It's a nice break from Tesla news -- and besides, our little robots weigh so little and move so slowly that even if something went horribly wrong and they hit you, injury is quite unlikely.)

Hermes, which does traditional package delivery is very interested in what I think is one of the core values of robot delivery -- namely delivery on the recipient's schedule. Today, delivery is done on the schedule of delivery trucks, and you may or may not be home when it arrives. With a personal delivery robot, it will only come when you're home, reducing the risk of theft and lost packages. Robots don't mind waiting for you.

The last mile is a huge part of the logistics world. Starship robots will get you packages with less cost, energy, time, traffic, congestion and emissions than you going to the store to get it yourself. They use a combination of autonomous driving with human control centers able to remotely fix any problems the robots can't figure out. Robots don't mind pausing if they have a problem and our robots can stop in under 30cm. As we progress, operation will reach near full autonomy and super low cost.

More details at the Starship press release. I am on the advisory team at Starship.

Comments

A food delivery company is an interesting choice if partner given that there are many other products which would have less of a timeliness constraint, e.g. Groceries.
There would also seem to be an additional issue with the last few metres especially in the case of food delivery to an office.
I presume the food will not be delivered to the appropriate floor, but retrieved from the street? Again delivering groceries to a house doesn't suffer this issue, though I tend to think of suburbian living by default living in New Zealand.
I can't wait to see the results.
BTW any idea if Starship Texhnologies is likely to become a public company in the near future?
Given that they were founded by the devlopers of Skype I guess they are not short of investors.

I think Starship delivery robot is the very first autonomous delivery robot.
It is focused on the function, delivery something. But I think It must have something more humor & wit on its body or somewhere.
Convenience is good item, but without humor or wit/fun it is not sufficeint to our dailylife. I'm wonder that our naighborhood could be more desolated by machiens without fun.
So I think Starship delivery robot can introduce some LCD panel which shows the machines emotion toward human, customers.
COZMO, the toy robot made by anki(https://anki.com/en-us/cozmo) is good sample on that point.
I hope our engineers will give humanic expression(emoticon-like)to their Delivery robot, autonomous car and somethingelse.

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