WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
- Automation appears to be the way of the future, and now even the humble pizza delivery driver is under threat
The food delivery robots, and drones, are coming. The technology is improving, people seem to be more receptive to the concept than they have ever been before, and increasingly the regulators are becoming the industry’s new cheerleaders.
Now Domino’s want in on the action, and unlike Amazon and 7-Eleven who are rolling out autonomous drone delivery systems Domino’s thinks their future is six wheeled and travels at 4 miles per hour – which means that even local deliveries could take at least fifteen minutes – and they’ve partnered with Starship Technologies, who’ve also inked deals with DoorDash and Postmates to make it happen.
In 2015 the tech loving pizza company joked about driverless delivery robots, and do you remember their “Domi-No-Driver” campaign? No, me neither, but now they’re serious and they’re going to begin using their new six wheeled robot friends to deliver pizzas in Hamburg, Germany in the next couple of months.
Capable of carrying a whopping 40lbs of pizza – seriously, who eats that much pizza, don’t answer – the robots will deliver pizzas within a one-mile radius. And with forecasts suggesting that by 2019 logistics firms will be using over 175,000 robots, which kicks even UPS’s huge delivery network of 100,000 vans into the shade the future for robot companies looks rosy – even if the same can’t be said for the people they’ll one day replace.
However, and someone has to ask it – what happens when one of these things gets kicked over or turned upside down by a bunch of teenagers, or a mob of angry ex-pizza delivery drivers? Nothing that’s what – cold pizza and a robot that’s going to be spinning its wheels until its battery runs out. Ha ha, silly robot…
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