Delivery robots – just a few years ago, the stuff of pure science fiction – are now very much a reality and quickly becoming a part of everyday life for many of us. In fact, I will usually come across five or six when I go for an evening jog in my hometown of Milton Keynes, England!

1. THE FUTURE OF
DELIVERY ROBOTS

2. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Delivery robots – just a few years ago, the stuff of pure science fiction – are now very
much a reality and quickly becoming a part of everyday life for many of us. In fact, I will
usually come across five or six when I go for an evening jog in my hometown of Milton
Keynes, England!
These particular ones belong to Starship, a company that deployed its first autonomous
delivery bots just three years ago and now operates a fleet of over a thousand, in
several locations in the UK, USA, and very soon in mainland Europe too.
I spoke to their CEO, Alastair Westgarth, who told me that his robots had traveled a
total of 3.6 million kilometers to make 2 million deliveries. Powered by machine learning
algorithms, they are constantly getting smarter, meaning they become more efficient as
well as safer.

3. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Of these journeys, the vast majority are completed fully autonomously; however, human
operators are always ready to step in when needed. Westgarth told me, "Safety is always
our number one priority, so if a robot encounters something unusual, it will stop and send
an alert to our remote operators.
"Most of the time, they will say it's okay, proceed – and release the robot. That's 90% of the
interactions … say there's a new crossing that's highly complex. But 99% of the time, they
are driving completely autonomously.“
This increasingly confident performance is something I can vouch for myself, having
witnessed their evolution with my own eyes. When they first appeared on the streets near
my home, they would come to a halt any time a person moved close to them. Now, it is
evident that they’ve learned to navigate by themselves, and I will see them just make small
corrections to their course in order to avoid moving into my path.

4. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
The robots are packed with sensors, including cameras with machine vision, radar, and
ultrasonic sensors that detect solid objects like curbs and walls. They cross 80,000 roads
every day, and initially, these were all carried out by human operators. However, as the
robots learned more about their environments, today almost every one is carried out
autonomously.
“We’ve driven 3.6 million kilometres so that’s a significant amount of ground we’ve
covered, and we do it 24/7, in the dark, in the snow, in heavy rain … when we first
encountered snow it was something the robots weren’t familiar with, it produced
different images from the cameras, and the sensors reacted differently, so we had to
train our systems to deal with that environment. They are constantly learning … our
autonomy today is orders of magnitude bigger.”

5. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
When we talk about robots, one topic we can’t afford to ignore is the potential
impact on human jobs. Delivery robots clearly pose a threat to human
employment, and while a common reaction to this is to suggest that humans
could be doing better things with their brains and bodies than the relatively
menial task of making deliveries, nevertheless these are jobs that allow people
to earn a living and support families.
Westgarth says that he is confident that enterprises like Starship will make
more job openings available to human beings than it will take away.

6. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
“We believe in our heart of hearts that as we bring in more technology that makes the
experience more efficient and more valuable … that we add to the employment base.
We're migrating employment, and … at the end of the day, we hope that the number of
jobs we create offsets the number of jobs that may be lost by autonomous delivery. If we
look at history, as efficiency and autonomy come in, the economy grows, and more jobs
are created - an obvious example is that there are no stagecoach drivers now, but there
are car drivers.
“At the end of the day, there will be more people taking care of our robots, more people
providing services to the merchants we deliver for, people programming our software,
developing our apps on phones and tablets. So employment will change, but we believe
it will go up," Westgarth says.

7. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Starship’s robots operate at what is known as the “last mile” of the delivery process
– in reality, the last one to three miles. This involves delivering goods from
supermarkets, grocery stores, takeaway food venues, and restaurants. Other
elements of the delivery and logistics industry are concerned with longer distance
domestic and international delivery, and here the impact of automation will be felt
soon too – with autonomous shipping, delivery vans, and airborne drones all on the
horizon. Of course, I took the opportunity to ask Westgarth where he sees Starship
fitting into this and how society will adapt to the broader challenges of
autonomous delivery, going forward.

8. © 2021 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
“We have no intention of delivering Sprinter van levels … over ten or twenty kilometers",
he tells me. "There's a need for that and ways to provide it, and today all of that is still
manual. But probably, it will become more autonomous in the future. [Delivery is] multi-
modal … its very difficult to scale these things economically with purely human-driven
options … so there’re challenges there. [But] it's much easier to scale the last-mile
delivery, with an autonomous approach.
“We’re trying to deliver goods in as efficient and effective a manner – where we're
adding to the value chain instead of taking away. I think it's a very bright future, we'll see
autonomous vehicles delivering on the road, we'll see more on the sidewalk, and we'll
see other options like drones as well. We want to be part of that future."

9. © 2021 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker,
futurist, and a strategic business & technology advisor to governments and
companies. He helps organisations improve their business performance, use data
more intelligently, and understand the implications of new technologies such as
artificial intelligence, big data, blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is
a frequent contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for
Forbes. Every day Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers
and shares content that reaches millions of readers.

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