Co-op hires delivery robots to drop off groceries in Greater Manchester

Autonomous delivery robots will be deployed on the streets of Greater Manchester this week as the Co-op partners with the self-driving logistics company Starship Technologies – making it the seventh British area to have them.

The first city to see the six-wheeled bots rolled out was Milton Keynes five years ago. Starship has expanded to cover deliveries to hundreds of thousands of households across the country, offering services in cities including Cambridge, Leeds and Northampton.

Its latest expansion to Sale, in Trafford, will be available to 24,000 residents and the catchment area of two local Co-op stores located on Washway Road and Coppice Avenue.

The robots — which are about the size of a mini fridge — travel at walking speed along pavements, using lights to cross the road and waiting outside customer’s houses until they use the app to come outside and unlock them.

It is a safer approach to driverless vehicles than full-sized delivery vans, and has allowed Starship to offer more than 4 million deliveries around the world since it first launched in Silicon Valley in April 2018.

As part of the rollout the company has partnered with local leaders in each new delivery area, avoiding some of the heated conflicts that may occur when a tech company tries to colonise a public space offering its services.

Trafford Council welcomed the rollout to Sale, with Stephen Adshead, the executive member for environmental services, saying he was ‘excited’ to be working with the company, and hoped it would help residents reduce car use.

“The robots are a lot of fun and it will be great to see them taking to the streets of the borough,” Adshead said. “Instead of driving to the Co-ops involved in the scheme, why not leave the car at home and have your groceries delivered by a friendly robot?”

Starship is not the only tech firm offering similar services across the globe. Competitors have been accused of selling systems pretending to be autonomous but are actually just hidden human labour, known as ‘mechanical Turks’.

In 2019 the tech company Kiwi admitted that its bots were only ‘semi-autonomous’ as they relied on human labour from a number of workers in Colombia — where the company’s founders hail from — to check in on each bot every 5-10 seconds to make sure they’re kept on track.

Starship says its robots are genuinely autonomous, meeting the ‘level 4’ standard – which requires no human interaction beyond exceptional circumstances.

It says its robots are autonomous ‘99%’ of the time, with some of them achieving multiple deliveries in a row without any human oversight. However, remote assistants remain on hand for safety reasons.