Delivery Robots to be Trialled in Aspley Guise
They are designed to deliver food, groceries and packages.
Central Bedfordshire is set to welcome the latest in door-to-door delivery, with Aspley Guise trialling cutting-edge robots.
Having already been rolled out to Milton Keynes, they bring local shops to your front room and use the same amount of energy as it takes to boil a kettle.
Starships Technologies' robots travel at around 4mph and will be rolled out to deliver food, groceries and packages.
Featuring state-of-the-art technology, the droids have been programmed to stop when they come into contact with a pedestrian, before carrying on with their journey once the path has been cleared.
A spokesperson for Starship says:
"Robotic delivery has the advantages of being super-affordable, convenient and environmentally much more friendly than jumping in the car to collect groceries."
"Essentially, the key is to make people’s lives easier and provide services that we all want and need to improve our lives."
"The robots have completed over 3.5 million commercial deliveries to date, using a combination of sensors, artificial intelligence and machine learning to travel on pavements and navigate around any obstacles, while computer vision-based navigation helps them map their environment to the nearest inch."
"Globally, they cross 140,000 roads per day - that’s 3 road crossings every second."
Councillor, Ian Dalgarno, is the executive member for Community Services at Central Bedfordshire Council and says safety was his highest priority:
"They've done millions of deliveries and they've got a fantastic track record in terms of safety."
"From the discussions I've had, they work very closely with blind charities and and people with sight difficulties."
Although the motorised machines are vehicular in nature, they will be featuring on cycle paths and pavements rather than taking up space on local roads:
"If you look at Milton Keynes, they've rolled this out initially using the great cycle path infrastructure, but they feel they can bring it into Central Beds and the infrastructure we have here now, they operate in a number of places around the world.
"They operate in the USA, Estonia, Denmark, Germany. So they're all pretty at a multitude of different environments and we wanna see, we get them into Aspley guys and we'll see if we can roll them out."