Unlike airborne delivery drones, which face a thicket of regulations in the US that makes their commercial viability uncertain, wheeled robots from startup Starship can start delivering packages in "weeks not years," the company said this week.
To prove its point, Starship is launching partnerships with DoorDash and Postmates, two delivery startups that until now have relied on a network of human freelancers to deliver food and other goods to consumers. Starship's diminutive, snow-white, six-wheeled robots will complement those operations by picking up extremely short deliveries that aren't attractive to humans on bikes or in cars, which DoorDash refers to as "Dashers."
"We expect to use robots to deliver these smaller, short-distance orders that Dashers often avoid, thereby freeing up Dashers to fulfill the bigger and more complex deliveries that often result in more money for them," DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
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DoorDash expects to begin a trial in Redwood City, Calif., over the next few weeks, taking advantage of the testing permit that Starship has already received from the Bay Area city of 76,000 people. Postmates, meanwhile, will begin delivery tests in Washington, D.C., according to TechCrunch.
Starship gave PCMag a demonstration of its first-generation robot last April. The smooth white plastic conceals a surprisingly spacious interior, which can fit small- or medium-sized packages, although probably not a large order of pizzas. A company representative said Starship envisions that consumers will pay a small fee, between $1 and $3, to have near-instantaneous delivery of their items, currently within a 4-mile range.
Neither Postmates nor DoorDash announced pricing for their trials, which are Starship's first foray into US retail delivery. The company has been testing its robots in more than a dozen cities, mostly in the UK, and also has a research partnership with the University of Arkansas.