If you live in San Francisco, you will often get a glimpse of the future—commuting in a self-driving taxi, say. In Milton Keynes? Not so much. But the English city, best known for its many roundabouts, is the place to go if you want to foresee a world without delivery drivers. It is one of the largest markets for Starship Technologies, an Estonian startup which claims to have cracked the problem of getting robots to deliver groceries more cheaply than people can.

Designers of delivery robots face challenges familiar to anyone developing robotaxis. Starship has had to build a sensor array that its six-wheeled couriers, each the size of a beer cooler, can use to navigate along pavements come rain or shine. That hardware must feed into an artificial-intelligence model that can pick the best route and carry on even if the connection to a data centre is lost.

In some ways, though, delivery robots have it easy. With a 35kg robot travelling at 6kph (4mph) tops, safety is less of a worry than it is with a two-tonne car going at 110kph on a motorway. And a slightly bumpy ride won’t hurt a pizza.

That said, whereas robotaxi firms often leave design to carmakers, robocouriers have no such option. Starship has by now created several generations of vehicles, and has optimised newer models for resilience and repairability. Gains can come from unexpected places, says Ahti Heinla, a co-founder. Starship’s latest batch of robots charge wirelessly, for instance, which is speedier and reduces wear on the charging ports.

After 12 years of such improvements, Mr Heinla says, the cost of each delivery is now “significantly less” than that of paying a human to do it. Starship is aiming for a cost of less than £1 ($1.34) per delivery. “It’s not quite there yet, but not very far away,” Mr Heinla says.

In 2018 the company had 127 robots, driving 116,000 kilometres in the year. By 2025 it had 2,414 robots, covering 5.2m kilometres. Along the way, it has reduced human interventions per kilometre by seven-eighths. Even so, at its scale rare problems, such as a robot failing in the middle of a street, add up. (The solution? A simple back-up computer designed purely to get it to the other side.)

The little six-wheelers may soon change how cities look. But they are sure to irk some people, not least out-of-work delivery drivers. Then again, in Finland, Starship’s biggest market, the startup’s supermarket partner has had to urge sympathetic passers-by not to lift the robots out of snowdrifts when they get stuck—lest they hurt themselves while attempting a rescue. ■

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