When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the 60’s cartoon, “The Jetsons,” but not for the reason many would think. While fans of the show would gawk and laugh their butts off watching the family of the future in their everyday life, I was dead-set on the technology the show predicted. In the 1960’s, the only thing that was even remotely autonomous was the technology responsible for assembly lines in manufacturing industries, and even then, those conveyer-belts were tended to by human employees.
In July of 2014, a company was founded with the same child-like bewilderment of the future as I had when I watched George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy fly in their space cars. Starship Technologies was created by two former Skype (MSFT) co-founders, with the mission of building robots to “revolutionize neighborhood deliveries and offer people convenient new service that improves everyday life,” according to their official website.
Rather than the recently popular approach of utilizing drone technology from companies like Amazon (AZMN), Starship believes that a land-based robot is safer, cheaper, and more practical.
“Robotics has a huge potential to change the world and improve people’s lives. We’ve always been attracted to big problems. And delivery is still a big problem, probably a bigger problem than helping people communicate over long distances.”
–Ahti Heinla, Co-Founder, Starship Technologies
Since the company’s inception, Starship has tested its autonomous delivery bots in multiple rounds of deployments. Back in April, the company tested its little robots on the Intuit Mountain View campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, as a means for delivering lunch to employees around the campus. The founders of Starship want to provide a service for people that make their lives easier and more efficient.
According to their press release immediately following the Intuit Launch, the starship fleet enabled employees to “order food and drink via the Starship app for delivery throughout their workday across all 4.3 acres of the Intuit campus.
Seeking to challenge Amazon’s (AMZN) convenience and efficiency of delivering items, Starship announced its plans to launch a $10/month subscription service that delivers all your packages on demand using the company’s team of wheeled robots, according to Forbes.
The new delivery service, launching in the British neighborhood of Milton Keynes, will be available to 5,000 residents in the area via the Starship app. According to Forbes reporting, residents of Milton Keynes can send their packages to a Starship location, and then, once the package/s are received, the robots will begin their journey to the person’s home or office.
In addition to the people of Milton Keynes, the company announced that people living in San Francisco, where Starship is headquartered, will have access to robot delivery services by the end of the year. Like Milton Keynes residents, customers in SF will have to direct their packages to a Starship facility for sorting. Once a customer is ready to receive their package, they simply use the app to schedule a delivery, and a Starship robot is on their way.
Some investors and tech experts have expressed safety concerns in terms of theft. Recent studies indicate that 30% of Americans say they’ve had a package stolen en route to their home or designated destination. So what happens if a suspicious character plucks one of the Starship robots off a San Francisco sidewalk in the middle of their delivery trip?
During the Artificial Intelligence Congress in London, in January, one of Starship’s co-founders, Kristjan Korjus, spoke on components of the company’s fleet of robots that make them more susceptible to issues.
He explained that the robots cost at the time was $5,500 per, and the company wanted to lower that cost by about 50%. That pricing, Korjus said, means “every sensor is quite crappy,” which ultimately suggests that these robots will have to be closely monitored on their journeys to customers.
While Starship works out the kinks of their delivery bots, new investors including Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn and others have invested over $42 million in the company. Any tech industry investor knows that a startup with this much attention presents a potential opportunity not worth missing.
All we can do is wait until our Starship robots deliver.
