Uber Eats delivers robotic meals in Miami

Uber Eats, the food delivery branch of the well-known taxi company, is now using robots to deliver meals in Miami. When will we see this in the Netherlands?

Six-wheeled robots take over the work of a bicycle courier

The six-wheeled robots will use the sidewalk, which doubles as a bike path in America, to deliver their meals to customers in Florida’s largest city. The robot comes from the company Cartken: a start-up founded by a number of former Google engineers in Silicon Valley. You can already see these robots on some university campuses, but this is the first deployment on public roads.

How do the Uber Eats and Cartken robots work?

Cartken’s robot cars have a speed of about 10 km/h. They are in fact a moving container that you can open with a pin code. This box fits about two shopping bags. A total of about 60 liters. The robots work with an electrical system and are controlled from a distance. They are also equipped with sensors and cameras to prevent them from causing accidents.

Uber has previously tried to use robots for delivery, but stopped developing them after one fatality.

How does the delivery service work with robots?

The system is quite simple to use. A customer orders a meal from a participating restaurant through the Uber Eats app. The robot cart drives to this restaurant while the meal is being prepared, the restaurant places the meal in the tray, the robot cart drives to the customer’s address and the customer can open the robot’s tray with a special PIN code.

Will this be the future of meal delivery?

Takeaway meals are becoming increasingly popular and now that staff is becoming increasingly scarce, we can just imagine that the whizzing mopeds of the pizza couriers and the like that you see on the road are increasingly being replaced by these types of robot cars. Perhaps even flying delivery drones, with which Amazon, for example, is already experimenting.