Why Vols will – or won’t – add transfer players
Food robots deliver to Vols, but they might not get hired off campus.
The food robots that roll around state-owned sidewalks at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have been prohibited from city sidewalks for the last six months and could be banned for good by the Knoxville City Council at its April 16 meeting.
After studying what deploying robots would look like downtown, city staff have recommended that council members prohibit private companies from putting their technology on city sidewalks, citing congestion and accessibility concerns. No meal delivery robots have been deployed in Knoxville, although they operate in other cities.
Council members unanimously placed a six-month moratorium on the robots in October. The moratorium, which did not affect UT’s robots, ends April 30.
With a pause in place, city staff spoke with UT leaders, city engineers, disability advocates and tech companies to get a sense of what delivery robots would mean for downtown.
They studied the differences between UT’s campus, where wide sidewalks connect one end of campus to another, and downtown’s older and more cramped pathways.
“We do recognize that at some point, this business model or the use of personal delivery robots as we’ve defined them might make sense in Knoxville,” Carter Hall, the city’s director of strategic policy and programs, told Knox News. “We just don’t think that it makes sense right now at the intersection of available infrastructure and the operating models that we see currently used.”