![]() I emailed a Kiwibot representative for comment more than a week ago and sent two follow-up emails this week. But it soon became clear they were just driving around in circles. A couple of students said they didn’t even realize it was an option.Īround lunchtime, I followed a couple of the Howard robots in hopes of seeing a delivery in action. I talked to half a dozen Howard students, and none had used a delivery robot. On the other hand, I couldn’t find any evidence that people were using the robots at Howard. She said deliveries typically take 10 or 20 minutes except during the lunch rush, which can take longer. One told me she used the Starship service regularly to order pizza or a burger for lunch. I talked to several George Mason students who received robot deliveries. Each restaurant had a line of Starship robots waiting outside, and I saw employees come out to put food in the robots at least three times. I spent time in a plaza at the north end of campus that featured a Panda Express, an Einstein Bros. On the day I visited George Mason, a lot of people seemed to be getting robot deliveries. By contrast, I found the Kiwibot app confusing, and I had to wait more than 30 minutes to get my muffin. The Starship app was easy to use, and my robot arrived in about 10 minutes. I took this approach for both the Starship and Kiwibot services, and the results couldn’t have been more different. This gives me a more realistic picture of how a service works for regular customers. Whenever possible, I like to try new technologies on my own, without pre-arranging the experience with the company. And over the next decade or two, I expect technology like this will become widely available off-campus, too. Over the next couple of years, I expect a lot more college campuses to feature Starship robots. But after seeing Tuohy’s robots in action, I believe him. It's a matter of robots coming off the line and hiring people for these areas.”Īfter more than five years reporting on self-driving technologies, I’ve learned to be skeptical when companies tell me they’re on the verge of large-scale commercialization. “We already know what the next campuses are, what the next cities are, all this stuff. “Our unit economics”-that is, the per-delivery cost of running the service-“are now at the point where I'm allowed to expand as fast as we can,” Tuohy told Ars in a phone interview. And he said the company is planning for rapid growth in the coming months. ![]() Ryan Tuohy, the company’s chief commercial officer, told me that the company has 2,000 robots in operation worldwide, up from 700 two years ago. The George Mason robots come from a startup called Starship. I got one of them to deliver me a donut without any difficulties-and I saw lots of robots cross streets unassisted. Two weeks before my Howard visit, I drove to Fairfax, Virginia, where dozens of robots were delivering food on the campus of George Mason University. Robots are supposed to save human labor, and this robot wasn’t doing that.īut another sidewalk robot company seems to be much further along. This did not seem like a viable business-at least not yet. The robot then made its way to my chosen delivery point, where I was able to retrieve the muffin without further difficulty. ![]() I caught up with her and watched her put my muffin in the robot, put the robot back on her scooter, and ferry it across the street once again. So the woman zipped off on her scooter with the robot balanced in front of her. It needed help crossing the street so it could pick up my muffin. I learned that the robot, made by a company called Kiwibot, doesn’t handle vehicular traffic well. I identified myself as a reporter and told her I’d recently ordered a muffin for robot delivery. Instead, it turned around and went back for some 200 feet before freezing once again.įinally, a young woman rolled up on a scooter and scooped up the confused robot. When it reached an intersection, it seemed afraid to cross the street. The robot repeatedly stopped, turned around, retraced its steps, and turned again. A digital display on the front showed a pair of pixellated cartoon eyes, but the robot was struggling to understand its surroundings. The four-wheeled vehicle, the size and shape of a large cooler, was navigating the campus of Howard University in Washington, DC. I’d been following the robot for about five minutes when it seemed to get hopelessly lost.
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