A delivery robot is an autonomous robot that provides "last mile" delivery services. An operator may monitor and take control of the robot remotely in certain situations that the robot cannot resolve by itself such as when it is stuck in an obstacle. Delivery robots can be used in different settings such as food delivery, package delivery, hospital delivery, and room service.
Deployments of food delivery robots were in a small scale prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. [1] By January 2019, there were some deployments on United States college campuses. George Mason University became the first university campus that incorporated on-demand food deliveries by robots as part of its meal plan with 25 robot fleet from Starship Technologies. [2] As the pandemic continued on, demands for food deliveries had increased significantly. This caused the demands for food delivery robots in college campuses to surge as well. [1] Starship and other companies such as Kiwibot deployed hundreds of food delivery robots to several college campuses and some city streets in the United States and United Kingdom. Food delivery service companies also added delivery robots to their platform. For example, Grubhub partnered with Yandex to provide services in colleges, while Uber Eats partnered with Serve Robotics, Motional, and Cartken for robot food delivery in various cities in the United States. [3] [4] Limitations of using food delivery robots includes inability to accommodate special delivery requests such as leaving the food at the door, and inability to navigate difficult terrains. This may require remote operators to help the robots to navigate around obstacles. [1]
In April 2018, Starship Technologies launched its groceries delivery service in Milton Keynes, England, in partnership with supermarket chains Co-op and Tesco. [5] By November 2020, said Starship Technologies, Milton Keynes had the "world's largest autonomous robot fleet". [6]
Early 2022 saw the opening of Nourish + Bloom, the first African American-owned autonomous grocery store in the world.The new store processes transactions using computer vision equipment in tandem with artificial intelligence-based voice and gesture technology. Nourish + Bloom offers delivery service using robotic vehicles supplied by Daxbot. [7] That startup, which is based in Philomath, Oregon, and raising investments through a crowdfunding campaign, has developed a unit that can travel up to 10 miles at 4 mph and has a temperature-controlled cargo space. [8]
In January 2019, Amazon launched an experimental service to deliver small packages to their Amazon Prime customers using delivery robots called Amazon Scout. The test was done in Seattle region and expanded to Irvine California, Atlanta, and Franklin in Tennessee. [9] In 2021, after testing of package delivery robots had been done in 4 U.S. cities, Amazon created a new development center in Finland to make further advancement in the technology in order for their robots to better handle real-life navigations. [10]
Delivery robots can perform several tasks in hospital settings to reduce operational costs. The first set of tasks are for food, medical specimens, and medicine deliveries. With multiple sensors, the delivery robots can navigate the interior layout of the hospitals. They also have an electronic signal that can request an elevator ride to be able to work in multi-story buildings. With security concerns, some delivery robots are equipped with code and a biometric fingerprint scan to prevent unauthorized access to the contents inside the robots. As of 2019 [update] there were more than 150 hospitals in the United States and elsewhere that deployed the delivery robots. The second set of tasks is to deliver soiled linen carts and medical waste. These requires heavy duty delivery robots as the weights to carry could be in several hundred pounds (several hundred kilograms). [11] [12]
In Israel, Sheba Medical Center uses delivery robots to shuttle chemotherapy drugs prepared by the pharmacy department directly to the nurses to cut down the waiting time. [13]
In late 2014, a room service robot named Relay was introduced by a robotics startup company, Savioke. When hotel staff received an order from a guest, the staff would put items inside Relay and the robot would deliver items to the guest room. By 2016, fleets of Relay robots were deployed at five major hotel chains. [14] In August 2017, M Social hotel in Singapore introduced room service robots named AURA to assist staff in tasks such as delivering bottled water and towels to guest rooms. It was the first such service outside of the United States. [15]
A number of companies are actively using small robots to do the last-mile delivery of small packages such as food and groceries just using the pedestrian areas of the road and travelling at speed comparable with a fast walking pace, companies actively delivering include:
Being autonomous, the delivery robots primarily interact with the general public without the assistance of a human operator, in both positive and negative encounters. [18] The delivery robot manufacturer Starship Technologies has reported that people kick their robots. [18] However, the vast majority of human interactions are positive, and many people have anthropomorphized the robots due to their appearance. [19] This has led to encounters where people feel a sense of caring towards the robots, assisting the robots when they are stuck, worrying for the robots on their journeys, or praising or thanking robots for their delivery service. [19]
An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and self-driving cars.
Package delivery or parcel delivery is the delivery of shipping containers, parcels, or high-value mail as single shipments. The service is provided by most postal systems, express mail, private courier companies, and less-than-truckload shipping carriers. Package delivery is different in each country, and how packages are delivered is closely connected with the cost for delivering to that country as well as population. In 2019, China, The United States, and Japan were the leaders in package delivery while Latvia, Macau, and Iceland were the bottom three. The population of the bottom three barely totals 2 million while the population of the top three tops totals more than 2 billion. Package delivery is an every day occurrence in the US while many other countries do not have this luxury.
Milton Keynes City Council is the local authority of the City of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, England. It is a unitary authority, having the powers of a non-metropolitan county and district council combined. It has both borough status and city status. The borough, which extend beyond the ONS-defined Milton Keynes urban area and encompasses a substantial rural component, is divided into 19 wards, electing 57 councillors.
Co-op Food is a brand used for the food retail business of The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom.
An online grocer is a supermarket or grocery store that allows ordering via websites or mobile apps. The order can either be collected by the customer or delivered to the customer by drivers engaged by the grocer, a food delivery service, or by delivery drones and robots.
Amazon Fresh is a subsidiary of the American e-commerce company Amazon in Seattle, Washington. It is a grocery retailer with physical stores and delivery services in most major U.S. cities, as well as some international cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg, London, Milan, Munich, Rome, Tokyo, and some other locations in Singapore and India.
In supply chain management and transportation planning, the last mile or last kilometer is the last leg of a journey comprising the movement of passengers and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination. The concept of "last mile" was adopted from the telecommunications industry, which faced difficulty connecting individual homes to the main telecommunications network. Similarly, in supply chain management, last-mile describes the logistical challenges at the last phase of transportation getting people and packages from hubs to their final destinations.
A delivery drone is a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to transport items such as packages, medicines, foods, postal mails, and other light goods. Large corporations like Amazon, DHL and FedEx have started to use drone delivery services. Drones were used effectively in the fight against COVID-19, delivering millions of vaccines and medical supplies across the globe. Drone deliveries are highly efficient, significantly speeding up delivery times and avoiding challenges traditional delivery vehicles may encounter. Given their life-saving potential use cases for medical supplies in particular have become the most widely-tested type of drone delivery, with trials and pilot projects in dozens of countries such as Australia, Canada, Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, the UK, the US among others.
Food delivery is a courier service in which a restaurant, store, or independent food-delivery company delivers food to a customer. An order is typically made either by telephone, through the supplier's website or mobile app, or through a third party food ordering service. The delivered items can include entrees, sides, drinks, desserts, or grocery items and are typically delivered in boxes or bags. The delivery person will normally drive a car, but in bigger cities where homes and restaurants are closer together, they may use bikes or motorized scooters.
Bolt is an Estonian mobility company that offers ride-hailing, micromobility rental, food and grocery delivery, and carsharing services. The company is headquartered in Tallinn and operates in over 500 cities in more than 45 countries in Europe, Africa, Western Asia and Latin America. The company has more than 150 million customers and more than 3 million driver and courier partners. The company has plans for an initial public offering in 2025.
Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing autonomous delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC, US, and Mountain View, California, US.
An automated convenience store is a convenience store that operates without a cashier, and instead relies on computers and robotics.
Oxa is an autonomous vehicle software company, headquartered in Oxfordshire, England, and founded by Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner.
Kar-go, is an autonomous delivery vehicle, designed and built by British company, Academy of Robotics Ltd, a UK company, registered in Wales. The vehicle uses self-drive / driverless car technology to drive itself to locations where it delivers packages autonomously.
Nuro, Inc. is an American robotics company based in Mountain View, California. Founded by Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, Nuro develops autonomous delivery vehicles and is the first company to receive an autonomous exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Zipline International Inc. is an American company that designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones. The company operates distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, Japan, the United States, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and Kenya. As of April 2024, its drones have made more than one million commercial deliveries and flown more than 70 million autonomous miles.
Robomart is an American technology company headquartered in Santa Monica, California that builds autonomous smart shops for cafes, ice cream parlors, and quick-service restaurants. The company’s white label platform gives retailers the option to expand their footprint at a significantly lower cost than traditional brick-and-mortar real-estate.
Yandex self-driving car is an autonomous car project of the Russian-based technology company Yandex. The first driverless prototype launched in May 2017. As of 2018, functional service was launched in Russia with prototypes also being tested in Israel and the United States. In 2019, Yandex revealed autonomous delivery robots based on the same technology stack as the company's self-driving cars. Since 2020, autonomous robots have been delivering food, groceries and parcels in Russia and the United States. In 2020, the self-driving project was spun-off into a standalone company under the name of Yandex Self-Driving Group.
Amazon Scout is a 6 wheeled delivery robot used to deliver packages for multinational company Amazon. Amazon Scout originally debuted on January 23, 2019, delivering packages to Amazon customers in Snohomish County, Washington. Amazon scouts move on sidewalks, at a walking pace. In August, 2019, the robots started delivering packages to customers Irvine, California on a test basis, with human monitors. The package is stored inside of the robot, and driven to the customer.
Academy of Robotics is a UK-based artificial intelligence technology company that creates technology to automate repetitive tasks and logistics.
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