The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2014-2024
Starship's sidewalk robots carried groceries the last mile without a van
Starship's small electric robots make short, repeated trips on the pavement, completing 7 million deliveries on about a kettle's energy each.
Starship Technologies · Bolt
the move
The last mile is the most expensive and polluting part of delivery; a van idles in traffic to drop a single bag across town.
Starship Technologies, founded by two Skype veterans, built a small six-wheeled robot that delivers food and groceries locally on pavements.
The robots have been self-driving at level 4 since 2018, make over 100,000 road crossings a day and have done more than 7 million deliveries across 8.5 million miles, mostly on short local trips.
A partnership with Bolt put robot delivery inside a mainstream food app, so a customer gets groceries in minutes without a courier's carbon.
why it works
- A small robot sized to a short trip uses a fraction of the energy of a van.
- Running on pavements avoids traffic and parking, so a delivery is reliably quick.
- A fleet of them scales with order volume without hiring thousands of couriers.
- Low cost and low speed make them safe and cheap enough to run as a service.
what transfers
When trips are short and frequent, spend capital on small autonomous vehicles instead of more drivers and vans.
what came after
Starship expanded to more than a hundred locations and passed ten million deliveries, and the electric sidewalk robot became a working alternative to both the courier van and the drone for dense local delivery.
references
- Starship Technologies and Bolt launch robot-powered grocery delivery
- Starship Technologies raises $90M for autonomous last-mile delivery expansion
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