The Future Of Delivery Robots

Delivery robots – just a few years ago, the stuff of pure science fiction – are now very much a reality and quickly becoming a part of everyday life for many of us. In fact, I will usually come across five or six when I go for an evening jog in my hometown of Milton Keynes, England!

These particular ones belong to Starship, a company that deployed its first autonomous delivery bots just three years ago and now operates a fleet of over a thousand, in several locations in the UK, USA, and very soon in mainland Europe too.

 spoke to their CEO, Alastair Westgarth, who told me that his robots had traveled a total of 3.6 million kilometers to make 2 million deliveries. Powered by machine learning algorithms, they are constantly getting smarter, meaning they become more efficient as well as safer.

Of these journeys, the vast majority are completed fully autonomously; however, human operators are always ready to step in when needed. Westgarth told me, "Safety is always our number one priority, so if a robot encounters something unusual, it will stop and send an alert to our remote operators.

"Most of the time, they will say it's okay, proceed – and release the robot. That's 90% of the interactions … say there's a new crossing that's highly complex. But 99% of the time, they are driving completely autonomously."