Could Delivery Robots Be the Next Big Thing?

For over a year, people around the world have been trying to circumvent the various challenges that COVID-19 presents. One of the biggest disruptions caused is the social distancing and lockdown measures that have kept non-essential workers from their usual places of work. Many employers have scrambled to develop and maintain adequate remote IT infrastructures for employees working from home.

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Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have seen many encouraging examples of the kind of innovativeness that will see us through these troubled years. The best of these new ideas seek to address a challenge posed by the coronavirus, but they also meet a demand that ensures their validity in a post-covid environment.

A future of robots

Robotic technology has been widely used for years, but it is often in the form of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) commonly used for business processes, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These robots do not appear to us in physical form, like RJD2 and C3P0, so we do not register them in our original definitions of the word. But this is all beginning to change.

In the early days of the pandemic, refugees at a refugee camp in Jordan trained in robotics developed a robot made from Lego to dispense hand sanitizer at a distance. 2020 also saw a four-legged robot introduced to the parks of Singapore to remind people to follow the restrictions of social distancing.

But while these are interesting advancements in the technology, they also meet one of the biggest surges in demand since the beginning of the pandemic. This is the enormous rise in delivery services that has seen e-commerce giants like Amazon go from strength to strength, and the rapid expansion of food delivery services like Uber Eats.

While drone schemes are beginning to be piloted for home delivery, they haven’t really taken off yet (pun intended). But when it comes to land-based robotic delivery, things are starting to happen.

Starship Troopers

Operating out of San Francisco, Starship Technologies is a U.S.-Estonian company that produces what they refer to as autonomous sidewalk delivery robots. These are mainly being used as a contactless food delivery service and they come in the form of a wheeled container.

Before the pandemic, they were already being used by airports, universities, corporate campuses, and some urban areas. Purdue University in Indiana began using the robots for food deliveries from August 2019, and Venezia New York Style Pizza in Phoenix, Arizona has been offering customers delivery by robot within a half-mile radius.

In January, Starship Technologies announced that it had reached the milestone of one million deliveries since it was founded in 2014. But the most interesting thing about the stats is that half of these deliveries were made in the previous six months, indicating an enormous growth for the company and industry.

Other companies are also working to develop sidewalk delivery robots. These include Roxo from FedEx, Amazon Scout from Amazon, and Postmates, which was recently acquired by Uber.

Legal challenges

The main barrier the company is facing is with the legislation that some states and local governments are bringing in. Some cities and local areas, like San Francisco, have imposed an effective ban on sidewalk delivery robots, only allowing some testing in particular parts of the city. The food delivery company, Postmates, was given a permit to test their device in the city, but this took two yearsIn some parts of the country, there are limited restrictions on delivery robots, such as speed or weight limits, or the need to obtain general liability insurance. These are workable parameters that sidewalk delivery robot companies can follow in their operations.

Most parts of the country have not yet responded to the rise of delivery robots, so companies are free to operate without restrictions. However, robot companies cannot really get settled as they anticipate a wave of new laws and policies at some point in the near future.

In some states, like Virginia, the laws have been updated to accommodate robot delivery companies. The weight limit of robots was extended from 50 to 500 pounds, they are also allowed to travel on the road if a sidewalk is not available, and they retain the same rights as pedestrians. Similar laws have also been passed in Pennsylvania.

While there are groups that are encouraging the robots as a promising new technology of the future, there are also groups vehemently opposed to them. This often comes in the form of health and safety concerns, but also from people worried that the robots threaten local employment.

Although there are many hoops and hurdles for companies like Starship to jump through and over, they have brought the world a solution that serves a useful purpose – especially in the time of a pandemic.

Whether we like it or not, the advent of robots is upon us.