Robot overlords –
“We saw that business double overnight,” startup says of UK grocery deliveries.
Timothy B. Lee – Apr , : am UTC
Rbot deliveries remain rare enough that it’s easy to dismiss them as curiosities. But that’s a mistake. The technology works now. Starship already has hundreds of robots in service delivering food to real customers. Spurred by demand from locked-down customers, that number could soon soar to the thousands and eventually into the millions. With lower costs and no need to tip, robots could make takeout more popular than ever as it gradually displaces human-driven food deliveries.
Fairfax City, Virginia, just north of George Mason University, represents one of Starship’s newest expansion areas. The company launched delivery service in the city last week, and setting that up only took a few weeks thanks to close cooperation with city officials who felt a sense of urgency due to the coronavirus.
Fairfax City resident Stuart James tells Ars that the service suddenly seems to be everywhere in his town. When he went grocery shopping at Safeway last Friday, he saw Starship people picking out groceries, paying for them, and loading them into robots. James tried to order dinner for his family using Starship on Saturday evening, but he was unable to do so. The app said, “our robots are very busy right now.” He had better luck ordering breakfast the next morning.
However, these inconveniences were more than made up by the “fun factor,” James said. “The kids went nuts when that thing came up to the house. It pleasantly greets you when you get your food and even says ‘goodbye and have a nice day’ as it leaves.”
In recent weeks, Starship launched another grocery-delivery service
These fresh markets are in addition to a number of existing Starship services on a plethora of other university campuses, including the University of Houston
, (Purdue University , and the University of Pittsburgh . The company also delivers groceries in Estonia and is experimenting with industrial applications in Germany and Denmark, Touhy said. “We have many hundreds of robots around the world.”
Starship’s rapid growth is particularly impressive because the company can’t just plop down a robot in a new city and turn it on . It has to get buy-in from city officials, sign up commercial partners, and make sure it has enough back-end resources to support each robot.
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