The food delivery robots preparing us for autonomous cars

The robots are built by Starship Technologies, a US company with a factory in Tallinn, Estonia (the one-thousandth has just rolled off the production line). Following four years of development, in 2018 the company launched the world’s first town-centre robot delivery service in Milton Keynes. Today, the town has the world’s largest number of delivery robots, with 120 of them trundling along its boulevards. Northampton came on stream in late 2020; it now has 30 robots, with a further 60 about to go into service. Other robots are hard at work in numerous American cities and university and college campuses and at a Volkswagen factory in Europe – which, given that Daimler is a shareholder in Starship, is quite a thing.

To get around, the battery-powered robots, which have a top speed of 4mph and a battery life of 16 hours, see and sense their surroundings using 10 cameras, including time-of-flight cameras to determine depth, 3D radar and an array of ultrasonic sensors. Since they travel on pavements, where pinpoint accuracy is required, they follow pre-mapped routes and triangulate their position rather than being guided by GPS. The robots’ party tricks include being able to contra-rotate their six wheels so they can turn on their own axis and, when suddenly realising an object such as a car is approaching as they’re about to cross a road or a driveway, quickly reversing.

Sensors and cameras aside, machine learning is the key to how the robots get around without incident. “As they move, they’re constantly adding to their database of experiences so that, for example, they learn to discern an approaching vehicle from its reflection in a puddle,” says Henry Harris-Burland, director of marketing at Starship Technologies. “While developers in the passenger car world are fitting increasingly sophisticated hardware to their autonomous development vehicles, we’re investing in the software that powers machine learning.”

Away from the technology, Harris-Burland says that gaining the public’s trust and approval for his company’s robots is vital: “Even though our robots are doing only 4mph and are no taller than the average dog, people and communities can still feel threatened by them, so we have to prepare them.” Conversations with local councillors, a letter drop to residents, a dialogue with Facebook community groups, meetings with local charities whose clients might feel unsettled by the presence of pavement robots and visits to schools: all these help pave the way and allay fears that Starship’s new robots are about to take over the pavements.

Starship’s approach is endorsed by experts in the world of autonomous vehicles. David Hynd, chief scientist at the Transport Research Laboratory, and Adam Gristock, technical consultant at Smart Mobility Living Lab London, are currently working with Servcity, a UK government-backed urban mobility project tasked with understanding how autonomous vehicles can become an everyday experience for all.

“An important goal in the development of autonomous urban vehicles is that they should become boring and simply part of the furniture,” says Hynd. “Winning hearts and minds in the community at the outset is a key to achieving this.”

Gristock admires how Starship’s robots cope with busy, unordered pavements. “Their speeds may be lower, but the requirement to perceive hazards and make split-second decisions is the same as for road-going autonomous vehicles,” he says. “Prioritising oncoming cars on congested urban roads is one challenge we’re tackling but which Starship’s robots appear to have overcome in terms of pedestrians on the pavement.”