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Sidewalk delivery robots find a niche on college campuses

- By Kyle Stock

Robot 509 from Starship Technologies is both patient and skittish. The autonomous machine, which resembles a Yeti cooler crossed with a Waymo mini van, moves around like a mammal near the bottom of the food chain. It freezes up in crowds and, even when utterly alone, scoots forward in halting spurts, seemingly suspicious of fallen leaves.

A few days after Thanksgiving, Robot 509 ferries some cargo across the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. It stops on a deserted road, waiting for about a minute before finally scooting across, then trundles over a stretch of pavement and some railroad track before coming to a full stop.

Rachael Haberstroh, a James Madison administrator whose office is a long walk from most of the campus’s cafes, comes over and taps on her phone. “It’s supposed to play me a song,” she says, watching skeptically as the entire top of the robot swings open. As 509 serenades her with Adele’s Easy on Me, she reaches in and grabs a large, iced Starbucks drink.

Robots designed for sidewalk deliveries have existed for years, drawing both suspicion—San Francisco banned them in 2017, before creating a program to allow some testing—and ridicule from those who see them as another Silicon Valley solution in search of a problem. Near-term expectations for all kinds of autonomous vehicles have fallen recently, after several years of unrealistically optimistic projections and a string of road fatalities. But sidewalk bots have begun to gain momentum in certain environments. A few thousand pedestrian-speed delivery robots are in operation, a figure that will at least triple in 2022 if the leading bot makers hit their goals.