Bryce Richter/UW-Madison
Robots began delivering food around UW-Madison in November. Designed in the Baltics, the automatons are able to navigate through snow and ice.
When a fleet of 30 robots began delivering food around the UW-Madison campus earlier this month, one early fear of university officials was vandalism.
“Students will be students,” says Peter Testory, director of University Housing Dining and Culinary Services.
But, instead, students have been looking out for the robot workers. “One of the things we’ve already seen is that students have taken them in as part of the community,” Testory says. If they happen to tip, students right them. They take selfies with them.
“I’ve seen students pet them,” Testory adds.
The university welcomed the robots as part of a partnership with San Francisco-based Starship Technologies Inc., which was founded in 2014. For UW, it is a way to expand services to students, says Testory. “Students are juggling more than they ever have,” he says. “We’re giving them the gift of time.”
UW’s dining service has 120 full-time employees and more than 300 student employees. It serves 90,000 meals a week from six facilities. Even so, students want more. They’re ordering more frequently from private delivery services, such as Grubhub and Uber Eats.
For campus dining, the bar keeps rising, and “delivery is part of that,” says Testory. “This is an attempt to give students what they’re asking for.”
Starship already provides this service to George Mason, Northern Arizona and Purdue universities. “In the United States, our main focus is university campuses, but we also operate in neighborhoods and local communities,” Henry Harris-Burland, vice president of marketing, located in the company’s Dallas office, tells Isthmus.
The company is aiming to add several universities each month until it hits 100 in 2021.
The cost of each robot is “equivalent to a high-end personal computer,” Harris-Burland says. Each robot weighs no more than 100 pounds and can carry up to 20 pounds, or about three bags of groceries. The current service area is roughly north of University Avenue, from Park Street to Eagle Heights. The robots also talk, thanking customers for their orders.
There is no cost to the university. Food is ordered through a free app and Starship collects a $1.99 fee for each delivery, plus 15 percent of the meal cost. The service is open to anyone who happens to be on campus. Students receive a 30 percent discount on any purchase when using Wiscard, a student ID and debit card.
“This is not taking anyone’s job,” says Testory. “In fact, we created a new student position.”
Starship claims that its robots are 99 percent autonomous. But what about crossing a busy street?
“The robots cross over 15,000 roads a day so this is a normal part of a delivery,” Harris-Burland says. “In fact, Starship robots have safely crossed more than 5 million roads over the past few years, traveled more than 350,000 miles and completed over 100,000 autonomous deliveries.”
The Starship robot’s top speed is 4 miles per hour. It has a bubble of awareness and can “see” up to 600 feet away to determine what is going on in the environment around it. It has 10 cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors.
Like the robots of The Terminator and Lt. Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Starship also has a “neural net,” meaning that it can learn, and what it learns it tells its robot coworkers.
When they first arrived at UW, the robots were sent on two weeks of training runs to learn where everything is. But things come up. Recently there’s been construction on Bascom Hill. Once they encountered that, the robots remapped and “told” each other about it.
“Starship robots are truly autonomous, but we aim for 99 percent instead of 100 percent,” says Harris-Burland. “There is a human operator who can monitor the robots from a remote location and can step in if the robot needs assistance. One human can monitor many robots at the same time.”
Surprisingly, weather is not a concern. “The robots were designed and built in the Baltics, so ice and snow are nothing new,” he says. “Starship robots are designed to work in a variety of conditions, whether it’s rain or snow or nighttime.”