Starship Technologies company was founded in 2014 by Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla. They are well known as people behind the Skype. Starship Tech. is focused on robotics. It is a technology company building fleets of self-driving delivery robots designed to deliver goods locally within 30 minutes. The robots drive autonomously 99% of the time to make safe and environmentally friendly curb-side deliveries from a local hub.
Starship’s relatively small wheeled delivery bots have been in testing in select cities in 12 countries during the last nine months already, but this expansion of the trial will mark the first time the robots are being tested in actual delivery scenarios. That means they’re bringing on partners to provide the delivery inventory, including food delivery players Just Eat, and London-based Pronto.co.uk. German retailer Metro Group and parcel delivery company Hermes will also take part in the pilot, which will span five cities providing deliveries to actual paying customers.
London, Düsseldorf, and Bern can expect to see the robots in action first, with other cities in Europe and America to follow as the trial progresses, including Brussels. Starship Technologies’ Marketing and Communications Manager Henry Harris-Burland tells TechCrunch that this phase of testing should span between six and eight months, with a full commercial deployment currently targeting 2017, pending progress of the trials.
However biggest challenge for the Starship Fleet is the society itself. Real-life experiment have yet to determine the abuse level for the drones.
