Starship’s Robotic Food Delivery is heading towards a college campus near you. On a mission to skyrocket its global reach in autonomous food delivery, Starship Technologies has announced that they are going to offer their delivery services to four more college campuses in addition to the 20 campuses currently in operation.
The four new schools that are being added to the Starship’s operational zone include the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), the University of Nevada in Reno (UNR), the Daytona Beach campus of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, and the University of Kentucky (UK). These universities will be embellished with tiny six-wheeled, zero-emission delivery robots.
This news follows on the heels of Kiwibot announcing a partnership with hospitality powerhouse Sodexo to offer food delivery services at college campuses. Not just Kiwibot, there have been other food delivery robots introduced in various college campuses like the Yandex Robots in the US.
Insights on the Starship’s Delivery Robots
All the robots are powered by electricity, have a trunk that can hold around 20 pounds of cargo, and are equipped with several integrated cameras that may be utilized for obstacle detection and navigation. In terms of delivery radius, the robots have a range of three to four miles and can go at a maximum speed of 4mph, which is less than a human driving or biking to deliver anything.
Many national restaurant brands will have their deliveries handled by Starship’s robots like Freshii, Starbucks, Panera Bread, Panda Express, Subway, Auntie Anne’s, Qdoba, Baja Fresh, and many more.
Currently, 1,000 robots are deployed on 20 college campuses in 15 states by the autonomous delivery service corporation. Since its start in 2014, Starship claims to have facilitated more than 1.5 million deliveries worldwide. The company raised $ 102 million till now, including $17 million in the recent funding this year. The company’s expansion to four new college campuses is just the latest in a series of accomplishments this year.
The Starship Food Delivery Mobile Application will allow students and professors to choose meals and then pin where they want their meals delivered. Users will have an option to locate the robot as well as they can wait for an alert to go outdoors and meet the robot on its arrival, where they can unlock the robot via the mobile application.
As part of its recruitment strategy, Starship says it will train and hire students from local universities willing to join the company and learn more about autonomous technology.
The CEO of Starship Technologies, Alastair Westgarth, says that the company will add new university schools and campuses every semester as it plans to offer jobs to students to allow them to work with robots and AI with real-world applications experience.
It’s not just students advocating robot deliveries; the market for self-driving delivery robots is expected to expand by over 50% between 2021 to 2026.
In the era of COVID-19, these autonomous delivery robots are an extremely safe option. Also, to overcome the accelerating complexity of last-mile delivery services, products like delivery robots from Starship can help to save businesses from logistics difficulties.
