College students living in hostels can often find it hard to get their everyday grocery delivered to them. Not in this college though. Reason, George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia has employed a fleet of self-driven delivery robots for this task.
Manufactured by Starship Technologies, a company dedicated to the development of self-driving delivery vehicles, two dozen plus autonomous robots will now be delivering Starbucks and pizzas to the college students.
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A total of 25 such robots can be requested to deliver up to 9 kgs of goods across the college campus. Students can use a dedicated app to get these goods delivered, which will be within 15 minutes, as per the publication Fast Company. Once at their residency, students can use their app to unlock the compartment and take out the contents.
The autonomous robots work on a combination of cameras, ultrasound and radar based navigation technology for driving themselves around the campus. They are also equipped with artificial intelligence to make impromptu decisions on the way, if and when they face an obstacle. The robots have been designed to run on one side of the sidewalk in order to avoid clashes with pedestrians.
Fleet of autonomous deliver robots by Starship Technologies. (Starship Robots/ Twitter)
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Back in 2017, Virginia legalised the use of autonomous vehicles to deliver goods to consumers. This also helped in making the George Mason University an ideal choice for such a test run. The ultimate goal is to rely on autonomous bots for such deliveries, rendering the current system of a full fledged, carbon spitting vehicle delivering a pizza or a coffee useless.