London Has Fallen — To Starship’s Self-Driving Delivery Robots

Drone delivery has gotten more than its fair share of press lately. A press push by Amazon late last year brought its nascent Prime Air program back into the spotlight, while Chinese eCommerce giants Alibaba, Baidu and others have begun penetrating the country’s prohibitively rural inner territories with the help of cargo-carrying quadcopters. Like the steady march of time, it seems that drone deliveries are all but inevitable.

But not if Starship Technologies’ earthbound autonomous delivery vehicles have anything (in binary) to say about it.

Newsweek reported that Starship’s as-yet-unnamed self-driving delivery robot has begun its first field tests with deliveries around London’s Greenwich neighborhood. Starship’s vehicle in question is no space-age delivery system, at least not to the naked eye. The cooler-sized robot burns rubber at a top speed of four miles per hour with up to 20 pounds of cargo. However, Starship officials told Daily Mail that there’s plenty of oompf for the Roomba-like courier to fulfill orders within five to 30 minutes — and for 10 to 15 times cheaper than other available door-to-door delivery options, Starship claimed.

Make no mistake, though, Starship may have just put its first delivery robots on the ground, but CEO Ahti Heinla told ZDNet it’s no less of a watershed moment for automated fulfillment as a future industry.

“While Google is testing self-driving technologies in California and some companies are building autonomous flying drones … none of this is in legal operation anywhere else in the world without the safety of a driver or without being supervised by a human being, and we’re actually in a position where we can do that for the first time,” Heinla said.

The particulars about how Starship has managed to keep in regulatory agencies’ good graces could shine a light on the future of automated delivery systems across the globe. For one, the robot’s speed — that of a leisurely stroll — eliminates many of the dangerous situations a drone might find itself in when navigating urban environments. Starship’s carrier travels exclusively on sidewalks, and a network of cameras helps identify impending obstacles; it can even detect oncoming pedestrians and will move itself off of the pavement until the “obstacle” has passed and it’s safe to proceed.

Unlike drones, whose obstacles are mostly of the antenna and power line variety, Starship also has to contend with the most uncontrollable variable of all: human actors. The Verge played around with the vehicle at the Mobile World Congress in February, where Starship COO Allan Martinson explained that consumers have taken a liking to the automaton, though this isn’t necessarily a good thing when the aim is express delivery. Martinson pointed to children in particular as most likely to try and stop the vehicle, even going so far as to pet or feed it. Theft of items from the robot’s internal storage is protected against with an unlocking code sent directly to the purchaser, but that doesn’t necessarily stop someone from damaging the robot past the point of operation or just picking it up and taking it wherever it’s not supposed to go.

However, Martinson said, “not a single person has kicked it.”

Of course, that could just be stereotypical British politeness. Newsweek explained that Starship is planning similar real-world trials in the U.S. sometime in April. While the company didn’t disclose any potential test locations, if its delivery bot can withstand a land with people who are more than happy to shoot drones out of the sky, it might be safe to say that the age of automated fulfillment is about to arrive.

About four miles per hour at a time.