The Robots are Coming!
Pandemic increases adoption of delivery robots
A mysterious service called TacoCopter appeared in 2012. Its offer to Bay Area residents: press a button on your phone, and a flying robot will deliver you a fresh taco.
The internet went wild. Every major tech blog covered it. There were technical feasibility posts. A competing service called UberTaco launched. We wanted to believe.
It’s 2020 now, and the future is here. Meet your delivery bots including one from Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Okay, so they don’t fly, and they look like driving boxes. But all of these robots are real and already making deliveries.
Starship Technologies. With its stormtrooper-like delivery bot, Starship Technologies, created by the founders of Skype, will expand to over 100 university campuses by the end of the year.
Postmates. Named Serve, these autonomous strollers look like a cross between an icebox and a Minion. They’ve already been sighted around San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Refraction AI. The REV-1 is already delivering food around Ann Arbor, Michigan. According to Axios, Refraction AI was struggling pre-COVID. They’re now dealing with a surge of demand from restaurants.
Why don’t any of the delivery bots fly? Technological complexity, for one. Safety, for another. Regulation as well; it’s illegal to fly a drone around most cities because of air rights.
But regardless, autonomous delivery is here to stay with COVID-19 accelerating its spread across the world.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, small sidewalk robots seemed to be slowly gaining traction.
Generally, these bots are light and slow-moving enough that they're unlikely to hurt anyone.
That has allowed companies to start using them in real-world applications, with minimal supervision, at a time when larger autonomous vehicles designed for road use still seem far from mainstream commercial use.
Robot deliveries remain rare enough that it's easy to dismiss them as curiosities. But that's a mistake. The technology works now.
Starship already has hundreds of robots in service delivering food to real customers.
Spurred by demand from locked-down customers, that number could soon soar to the thousands and eventually into the millions.
With lower costs and no need to tip, robots could make takeout more popular than ever as it gradually displaces human-driven food deliveries.