First, there was Siri in your pocket answering text messages for you and then there was Alexa giving you weather updates from the kitchen counter.
Now, there is Starship delivering your food at the front door.
Starship Technologies is reinventing the way people receive deliveries such as food, groceries, and other packages. The San Francisco, CA-based company has launched these delivery robots in different cities and across college campuses such as Oregon University, the University of Houston, and more.
While these devices might seem highly new and futuristic, they were actually developed and prototyped in the Summer of 2014 by Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis.
The robots proved especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic when many restaurants and services needed to move to contactless deliveries. The process works in a very similar way to services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, one key difference being that there is no one on the other side of the door handing out the delivery item.
The delivery robots can hold up to 20 pounds, cross streets, climb curbs, travel at night and through extreme weather conditions such as rain or snow. While traveling, the robots move at about 4-miles per hour, carefully avoiding pedestrians and vehicles while also adhering to traffic signals.
Customers must first download the Starship Delivery app and see if it is available in their area, in accordance with the robot's pre-mapped route. Once the user has done so, they can begin their order and drop a pin to the location of their choice. The movements of the robot can be tracked through an interactive map.
Now for the awaited moment. Once the robot arrives, users will receive an alert, meet the robot and then unlock the robot’s merchandise compartment through the app. The compartment opens, then BOOM, there is the beloved delivery item.
While the robots are largely automated, occasionally there will be a human on the other side of the screen navigating the robot to help it out of challenging situations, such as traffic or other road obstacles.
If this didn’t seem crazy enough, the robot can also talk. According to Starship executive, Ryan Touhy, if the robot is trying to get around a large group of people, it will say ‘Hello I’m a Starship delivery robot. Can you please let me pass.’
As of April 2021, Starship robots have completed about 1,500,000 autonomous deliveries.
The future of deliveries is here and it starts with Starship Robots. So, the next time you order a pizza, you might be given the option of having a driving robot deliver it to your front door.
And if you see one of them out of the road, don’t worry, they won’t run into you. They are instructed to give you, the human, the right away.
