4 ms·

This is interesting, but these robots move slowly - or at least not as fast as a car. I don't see food from outside a mile or 2 km range being deliverable in a

• plorkyeran 9y ago
  I live in Berkeley in one of the areas that they're testing these and there's 20+ restaurants that do take-out within a mile of me, so that part isn't a big issue. Even a mile could be a 30 minute round trip though, as they run on sidewalks and so inherently can't really go much faster than walking speed, and that's not very many deliveries per hour per robot.
  • heinrichf 9y ago
    I think Yelp/Eat24 is also testing the Marble (https://www.marble.io/ https://www.marble.io/) robots downtown.
  • dheera 9y ago
    Autonomous robots are far cheaper than humans to operate and could more easily parallelize the task of doing multiple deliveries per hour. In addition, the markets will expand significantly when the price of food delivery comes down to $1-2. Also, car-driven food deliveries also only average about 2 per hour, in part because of parking issues on both restaurant and customer end. (disclaimer: I am a co-founder of one of their competitors -- robby.io -- we're based in Palo Alto/Stanford)