Robots are ready to make deliveries to college, corporate campuses.
Robots are coming to corporate and college campuses to deliver food and other items to workers and students. That’s the hope of Starship Technologies, which makes cooler-sized autonomous robots for on-demand deliveries.
“The campus service we are now offering is ready to scale to thousands of robots and hundreds of campuses,” said Starship CEO and cofounder Ahti Heinla, who previously co-founded Skype.
Despite that aspiration, Estonia’s Starship is not announcing any actual deals. It’s been testing food deliveries with a small fleet at Intuit’s 4.3-acre, 12-building Mountain View complex, in addition to industrial-material deliveries
at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Germany.
Starship’s R2D2-like bots have trundled city sidewalks for a couple of years to deliver hot food and groceries, but the cloistered grounds of private campuses may offer an easier environment.
San Francisco passed rules in December limiting the city to nine sidewalk robots, which can operate only in industrial areas. While other cities have been more hospitable — San Jose said last week that it welcomes delivery robots, and several smaller Bay Area cities already have them — private campuses eliminate the need to get permission from lawmakers and limit ire from pedestrians forced to share the sidewalks.
“None of the efforts by us or others around food delivery in urban areas have been large-scale,” Heinla said.
Starship has about 100 robots operating in the U.S. and Europe, which appears to be the most among the crop of startups focused on robot deliveries.
Besides food, the robots could also deliver supplies such as phone chargers, ink cartridges, printed materials or basically anything that would fit in their compartments, which are the size of two large grocery bags.
To get set up, Starship will map out a participating campus. Workers use an app to request a delivery.
The robots, which are stationed outside the cafeteria, roll there to receive orders and then trundle to the worker’s building door.
The workers — notified on the app — come outside to get their orders, so the robots don’t have to navigate stairs or elevators.
The robots come with box-like pods that they can autonomously visit to have their batteries automatically swapped out for fresh ones, while the spent ones are recharged.
Starship would not discuss prices, saying only that it’s a “reasonable” monthly subscription generally paid by the foodservice provider.