Starship robots avoid mishap by 'screeching' when people try to rob them in Milton Keynes

Incredibly, not one of the 4mph machines has been stolen or robbed of the groceries or takeway food they carry.

This is mainly due to the fact that the robots "screech" when anybody unauthorised tries to pick them up.

“We have had incidents,” said Starship spokesman Henry Harris-Burland.

“But we feel comfortable with where we’re at right now, because no one has managed to steal one or anything like that. There’s alarms if you pick it up. As soon as you pick it up it’s like a screeching car alarm going off.”

Speaking to The Engineer magazine, he said the six-wheeled robots had now notched up a total of 350,000 miles delivering groceries, hot food and packages to customers on demand.

“We’re talking about hundreds of deliveries a day in Milton Keynes. Thousands and thousands of customers. Something like more than 75 per cent of the entire area that we operate in has had a robot delivery," said Mr Harris-Burland.

People sign up for Starship deliveries and download an app that allows them to unlock the robot to access their delivery People in MK can order groceries from Tesco or the Co-op or food from JustEat. The robots' locations are tracked, so customers know exactly where their order is and receive a notification when it arrives.

Starship’s robots travel on paths and across roads, sharing space with pedestrians and giving way to them They use machine vision and GPS to navigate, building up a detailed picture of their environment over time.

Since launching in MK in 2018, the robots have received upgraded hardware, software and also battery advances to enable them to cover up to 50 miles on a single charge.

“We do have new cameras,” Mr Harris-Burland told The Engineer. “There’s 10 cameras instead of eight cameras now. There’s all sorts of sensor fusion that we didn’t have previously. The batteries have changed as well. Previously we had batteries that were running maybe three hours. Now we’ve got batteries that last all day, 18 hours or more.”

“The improvements have come in the autonomous driving, in the machine learning. In our understanding of ‘Is that a trash can? Is it a bicycle? Is it a pedestrian?’”

Mr Harris-Burland said said the robots are now so commonplace in MK that the novelty has worn off for the public.

“They’re seen every day, out in the public, on the sidewalks on pavements, and they’ve been embraced universally, which is one of the most important things for us.”

Though Milton Keynes has been a major success for Starship, the biggest market is the US, where the robots can be found across eight university campuses and one corporate campus. The company is also operating on industrial campuses in Germany and Denmark, as well as in in Tallinn, Estonia.