Delivery robotics: starting from the campus

Grubhub will distribute suitcase-sized rovers built by Russian technology company Yandex NV to 250 colleges in the United States where Grubhub already operates. The six-wheeled autonomous rovers have been tested in recent years on the snow-covered streets of Moscow, delivering all sorts of food, groceries and documents. Since April, the robots have been put into a trial run of their efficiency delivering orders from local restaurants in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Grubhub “partners with college campuses across the US to offer students the ability to integrate their meal directly into their Grubhub account and access both on-campus and off-campus restaurants for delivery and pickup. With the Yandex SDG partnership, universities can bring this technology to their campuses and change the traditional university food experience, ”explains Dmitry Polishchuk, CEO of Yandex Self-Driving Group. “We are delighted to field dozens of our rovers and advance to the next step in actively commercializing our autonomous driving technology.” The pandemic has certainly given an impetus to the food delivery business, pushing hard on the side of the automation of deliveries: the use of robots and drones certainly aims to reduce labor costs, one of the major obstacles when trying to make deliveries profitable. In this direction, Starship Technologies Inc., based in San Francisco, is also implementing the delivery service on US university campuses while in Sacramento, California, the robots of Nuro LLC have already contributed to the transport of food during the pandemic. clean linen and personal protective equipment. DoorDash Inc. recently acquired robotics startup Chowbotics, focusing on automating food production: Chowbotics technology can make salads and poke bowls, among other things, and DoorDash is exploring how to distribute production in restaurants. On this front, it is planned to use production technology to help restaurants expand their menu, for example by allowing a pizzeria to offer salads or a salad bar to open in other places, such as an airport corner, without the need to hire more manpower: “We are working on solutions to help merchants grow in an ever-changing landscape, and with Chowbotics we hope to improve our level of customer support.” The company said Chowbotics has installed its robots for preparing meals in hundreds of different places and situations such as universities, hospitals and grocery stores.