DELIVERY ROBOTS AID BRITISH TOWN DURING PANDEMIC
British city locks down to fight coronavirus, uses fleet to bring necessities
Two years ago, a startup in a small city about 50 miles northwest of London deployed a fleet of squat, six-wheeled bots to shuttle grocery and dinner orders to homes and offices.
If any place was prepared for quarantine, it was Milton Keynes. Two years before the pandemic, a startup called Starship Technologies deployed a fleet of rolling delivery robots in the small city about 50 miles northwest of London.
The squat six-wheeled robots shuttled groceries and dinner orders to homes and offices. As the coronavirus spread, Starship shifted the fleet even further into grocery deliveries. Locals such as Emma Maslin could buy from the corner store with no human contact.
“There’s no social interaction with a robot,” Maslin said.
The sudden usefulness of the robots to people staying in their homes is a tantalizing hint of what the machines could one day accomplish — at least under ideal conditions. Milton Keynes, with a population of 270,000 and a vast network of bicycle paths, is perfectly suited to rolling robots. Demand has been so high in recent weeks, some residents have spent days trying to schedule a delivery.
In recent years, companies from Silicon Valley to Somerville, Mass., have poured billions of dollars into the development of everything from selfdriving cars to warehouse robots. The technology is rapidly improving. Robots can help with deliveries, transportation, recycling and manufacturing.
But even simple tasks such as robotic delivery still face technical and logistical hurdles. The robots in Milton Keynes, for example, can carry no more than two bags of groceries.
“You can’t do a big shop,” Maslin said. “They aren’t delivering from the superstores.”
A pandemic may add to demand but does not change what you can deploy, said Elliot Katz, who helps run Phantom Auto, a startup that helps companies remotely control autonomous vehicles when they encounter situations they cannot navigate on their own.
“There is a limit to what a delivery bot can bring to a human,” Katz said. “But you have to start somewhere.”
Founded in 2014 and backed by more than $80 million, Starship Technologies is based in San Francisco. It has deployed most of its robots on college campuses in United States. Equipped with cameras, radar and other sensors, they navigate by matching their surroundings to digital maps built by the company in each location.
The company chose Milton Keynes
for a wider deployment in part because the robots could navigate it with relative ease. Built after World War II, the city was carefully planned, with most streets laid out in a grid and bicycle and pedestrian paths, called “redways,” running beside them.
When the Starship robots first arrived in Milton Keynes, one of the fastest-growing cities in Britain, Liss Page thought they were cute but pointless. “The first time I met one, it was stuck on the curb outside my house,” she said.
Then, in early April, she opened a letter from the National Health Service advising her not to leave the house because her asthma and other conditions made her particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. In the weeks that followed, the robots provided a much-needed connection to the outside world.
Smaller deliveries suit Page because she lives alone. A vegan, she can order nut milk and margarine straight to her door. But like the grocery vans that deliver larger orders across the city, the Starship robots are ultimately limited by what is on the shelves.
“You pad out the order with things you don’t really need to make the delivery charge worthwhile,” Page said.
Though this may be the most extensive deployment of delivery robots in the world, others have popped up in recent years. In Christiansburg, Va., Paul and Susie Sensmeier can arrange drugstore and bakery deliveries via flying drone.
Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been offering drone deliveries in the area since the fall.
And like the robots in Milton Keynes, the drones can carry only so much.
“I can only get two muffins or two croissants,” Susie Sensmeier, 81, said.
Companies such as Wing and Starship hope they can expand these services and refine their skills. Now there is new impetus.
“Overnight, delivery has gone from a convenience to a vital service,” said Starship’s chief executive, Lex Bayer. “Our fleets are driving nonstop, 14 hours a day.”