To Reduce Human Contact During The Pandemic Russia Is Using Self-Driving Robots To Deliver Food

As countries across the world are rushing to stem the spread of the coronavirus, many are closing doors to eat-in diners.

Amid this scenario, a growing number of startups are aiming to deliver restaurant or supermarket food to your home in the tamper-proof compartment of a robot-on-wheels.

Reuters

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One such company is a Russian Internet giant Yandex which is using robot buggies to deliver hot restaurant meals to paying customers in one central Moscow district.

The Yandex.Eats app, one of the several food and grocery delivery services in Moscow, is offering customers around the White Square business district the option to have meals delivered by a buggy-like delivery robot instead of a human.

The robot, called the Yandex Rover, has been delivering groceries in some Moscow areas as part of a pilot programme since the autumn. It is now gradually expanding its catchment area, a Yandex spokeswoman told Reuters.

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Reuters

It picks up orders from restaurants and brings them to the customer who then unlocks the robot using their smartphone and lifts out the food, reports Reuters.

Three of them are now operating in the White Square area, part of a city-wide fleet of 20 robots, it said.

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The Yandex delivery service and its rival, Delivery Club, mean the sight of delivery couriers wearing bright yellow or green overalls with boxy thermal satchels on their backs has become ubiquitous in Moscow in recent years.

The Moscow Times

Over the summer, five Russian retailers commissioned a monument in Moscow to honour tens of thousands of delivery couriers who it said had kept the capital ticking during a weeks-long lockdown to curb the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yandex, sometimes described as Russia¡¯s Google, said in November last year it had started testing autonomous delivery robots. It has also started using them commercially in Innopolis, a tech district in Tatarstan region, it said.

All Inputs Reuters