College campuses across the country will no longer be swarming with tiny rolling robots.
Starship Technologies, a leading delivery bot company, announced earlier this month that it was ending its university operations and redeploying over a thousand of its meal machines. But the news is just starting to sink in, as various partnered universities all issue official communications mourning the program’s end like obituaries for a celebrity’s passing.
The time has come for the takeout drones to hit the big leagues, as the company intends to focus on doing deliveries for grocery chains and restaurants in cities instead. And shut-in, no-tipping undergrads from coast to coast weep.
“We’re seeing a lot of traction for delivery robots across numerous industries including industrial, universities, and corporate, but it’s time for us to focus on the vertical we feel will have the most value, both for our clients and for Starship,” CEO Ahti Heinla said in a statement.
Symbolically and literally, the pull-out is a pretty big deal for Starship. Serving students was how it made a name for itself in the US, when it first unleashed a sortie of its burger butlers at George Mason University in 2019. It went on to partner with more than 60 other universities, which acted as a more forgiving laboratory to test its roaming dumbwaiters than the unpredictable chaos of city streets.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also an unexpected boon for the company, during which its robots delivered up to 400 orders per day at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a university administrator claimed.
Broke students have come to love the uncomplaining delivery bots — at least according to Starhip’s own survey. Some 97 percent of the over 5,000 students it queried said they liked or loved the robots, which the company brags is one of the highest approval ratings for any AI-powered tech out there.
“Our campus partnerships have been foundational to who we are,” a Starship spokesperson told Journal & Courier. “Universities are engines of innovation, and we’re genuinely grateful they believed in our vision from the very beginning.”
But Starship has bigger dreams now. It projects that the demand for grocery delivery bots will boom tenfold over the next two years. In Finland, its robots already handle one in five grocery deliveries, it claims, and it expects to carve out that kind of share in the rest of Europe and the US, too. In all, it’ll be redeploying over 1,200 robots from college campuses across the US.
Needless to say, it’s a big gamble. College students may love the food-ferrying sidewalk crawlers, but many city residents don’t. The robots can’t help but bumble through urban environments like a bull in a china shop, with countless videos showing them wreaking havoc by disrupting traffic, destroying glass bus shelters, and impeding disabled pedestrians. Some have even injured humans.
One ward in Chicago has banned delivery robots from operating in the area, highlighting the company has its work cut out to win over urban residents.
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