A partnership between George Mason University and two companies, Sodexo and Starship Technologies has developed a new home-based food and drink delivery service to students on campus based on autonomous robots.
The demand for food at home is already worth billions of dollars: two US companies, Postmates and DoorDash, are already worth 2 billion and 7 billion respectively.
A confined university area is the best possible test platform: the results prove it, with over 10.000 deliveries already made with a 0% margin of error.
Currently you can order food through 5 major fast food chains, receiving it until 2 am: when fully operational, the service will be able to operate 24 hours a day. "We have also created 24 jobs for the management and maintenance of the robot fleet, The developers say.
In these parts, the calculation on the seats lost by the "riders" who do not deliver even at night without stopping is easily done: yet the future of deliveries, whether we like it or not, seems closer to these cubes with wheels than to willing kids on bicycles.