If you live in San Francisco, you may often get glimpses of the future, such as commuting to get off work in self-driving taxis. In Milton Keynes? Not so much. But if you want to see a world without delivery drivers, this British city between Oxford and Cambridge, known for its large number of roundabouts, is where you should go. It’s one of the biggest markets for Estonian startup Starship Technologies, which claims to have solved the problem of letting robots deliver groceries more cheaply than humans.
designer delivery robot Face challenges similar to those faced by robotaxi developers. Starship had to build a sensor array that its six-wheeled couriers (each the size of a beer cooler) could use to guide itself along the sidewalk, rain or shine. The hardware must be fed into an artificial intelligence model that can autonomously choose the best route and continue to operate even if the connection to the data center is cut off.
But in some ways, delivery robots make it easy. A robot weighing 35 kg traveling on a highway at 6 km/h (4 mph) has less safety concerns than a 2-ton car traveling on a highway at 110 km/h. A slightly bumpy ride doesn’t hurt the pizza.
That is, while robo-taxi companies can leave car design to the automakers (which most companies do), robo-delivery companies don’t have that option. To date, Starship has created several generations of aircraft. Therefore, it has enough data to optimize the resiliency and repairability of new models. Co-founder Ahti Heinla (who also co-founded Skype, the Internet video calling service acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011) said revenue could come from unexpected places. For example, Starship’s latest batch of robots use wireless charging, which charges faster and reduces wear and tear on the charging ports.
Mr Heinla said that after 12 years of incremental improvements, the cost per delivery was now “significantly lower” than the cost of manual delivery. Starship aims to cost less than £1 ($1.34) per delivery. “It’s not quite there yet, but it’s not very far,” Mr. Heinla said.
In 2018, the company owned 127 robots and drove 116,000 kilometers throughout the year. By 2025, it will have 2,414 robots covering 5.2 million kilometers. In the process, human intervention per kilometer was reduced by seven-eighths, the company said. Even so, at scale, rare problems, such as a robot malfunctioning in the middle of a street, can add up. (The solution? A simple backup computer designed purely for getting it to the other side.)
Small six-wheelers could soon change the face of cities. Could they also make people kinder to artificial intelligence? Probably not, especially if you’re an unemployed delivery driver. However, in Finland, Starship’s biggest market, a director at one of the startup’s supermarket partners had to urge sympathetic passers-by not to lift the robots out of snowdrifts when they got stuck, lest they get hurt during rescue attempts.
