The dream of robots bringing lunch to the office just moved a step closer to reality. More than two years ago, the co-founders of Skype revealed a six-wheeled robot they hoped would drive on pavements and make deliveries. After more than 100,000 miles of experimental testing, Starship Technologies is ready to set its robots free.
For the last three months, the robots have been delivering food from cafeterias and office stationery around the 4.3 acre campus of California-based software company Intuit.
Workers at the firm use Starship's app to select what food they want to order and drop a pin on a map – in a similar way to how the Uber app works – for where the delivery should be made. The robots don't enter buildings but can arrive at a door where they can be opened using the app. Deliveries at Intuit have taken an average of 17 minutes to arrive.
"We are ready to scale this," Starship's co-CEO Ahti Heinla explains. "So far, we have done commercial deliveries in other places as well. But these have been limited in the sense that we are still perfecting the service". After the successful trial with Intuit, Starship is now offering its robot delivery services to other companies.
The announcement is a big next step for the company, which was founded in late 2015. In the past three years Starship Technologies has completed a number of tests with food delivery firms and struck deals that will allow it to create a network of robots in the future.
In the UK, the robots have been roving around Milton Keynes, including in the snow. In London, the company has partnered on trials with takeaway service JustEat to deliver food to people's homes. And it has also tested its robots in the US.
The six-wheeled bots use GPS, radar, cameras and ultrasonic sensors to drive autonomously and carry items in their locked storage compartments.
After multiple years of testing, why is Starship now ready to take its robots into a more human-facing environment? Janus Friis, one of the company's co-founders and co-CEO, says the firm has been getting its self-driving technology up to required standards.
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"We aim to get to 99 per cent autonomy but we never have to get to 100 per cent," he explains. "If there's an edge case scenario which the software doesn't know what to do with we can always slow to a stop and have an operator take control of the robot."
Friis also says the firm has taken time to develop the whole robotic system. As well as building the physical bot it has also created its app and "pods" for the robots to be stored in. "The robots can drive into a pod and have their battery swapped automatically," Friis adds.
In the years it has taken Starship to refine its technology, the nascent personal robot delivery industry has become more competitive. San Francisco startup Marble has made some test deliveries in the city. Elsewhere, Robby has been hard at work on similar-sized delivery bots; Silicon Valley's Nuro has made an autonomous delivery van that's half the size of a car, and another has been developed by Dispatch.
But firms developing pavement hogging delivery robots have faced legal challenges. In December 2017, lawmakers in San Francisco voted to limit the number of sidewalk-patrolling robots to nine across the entire city. Each company is allowed to trial a maximum of three across the area at a top speed of 3mph and with constant human supervision. What's more, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the robots can only be used in industrial areas. In Washington, some of Starships' robots have been hit by cars.
To pre-empt such bans, or at least limit their impact, Starship has been trying to work with city officials. At least five states in the US have created laws that allow for robots to operate on their pavements, even though Starship isn't working in the areas yet.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
