Autonomous delivery robots hit London

Set up by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, Starship has been testing its six-wheeled bots across 40 cities since the end of last year, clocking up about 5,000 miles so far without incident. The next phase of the programme will see the company team up with partners including Just Eat and Hermes to begin ‘last-mile’ deliveries of food, groceries, and parcels.

Travelling on paths at approximately 4mph, the battery-powered bots are designed to operate in a 2-3 mile radius. They use predominantly off-the-shelf components that include GPS and a nine-camera computer vision suite, all overseen by proprietary software. The bots map their surroundings as they travel, with the level of autonomy increasing the more time they spend in a designated delivery area.

“The robot will be operating in a neighbourhood, say nine square miles,” Starship’s marketing and comms manager, Henry Harris-Burland, told The Engineer. “In order for the robot to drive autonomously within that neighbourhood it would have to map the area. It uses computer vision to do that, meaning it analyses straight lines from its nine cameras, and it’s analysing thousands of lines every second, which builds a 3D map of the environment around it. After it’s built that map it can then operate autonomously in that neighbourhood.”