Food and grocery delivery company Postmates has been given the first permit in San Francisco to test sidewalk delivery robots, according to TechCrunch, paving the way for the company to test the Serve autonomous delivery robot it announced in December.
The permit will let Postmates, which is available in 3,500 cities, expand into a new method of transportation for deliveries.
Postmates claims that the electricity-powered robot, which has Velodyne LIDAR sensors and an Nvidia Xavier processor, can carry 50 lbs and travel 30 miles on a single battery charge.
San Francisco Public Works rules say that permits are valid for 180 days, that each permittee can test up to three autonomous delivery devices, and that each robot being tested must have a human operator within 30 feet for the duration of testing.
As a result, you aren’t going to see hordes of autonomous delivery robots on the sidewalks of San Francisco just yet.
Postmates said in December that it initially planned to roll out the robot in the Los Angeles area and bring it to “key cities” across the US, but according to TechCrunch, no other pilots have been announced.
Postmates will be getting a permit to trial its sidewalk delivery robots in San Francisco, according to a report.
San Francisco Public Works will allow the food-delivery app to run tests on the service, TechCrunch reported Wednesday.
Postmates had originally partnered with Starship Technologies to trial delivery robots in Washington DC back in January 2017.
In December last year, it then announced it was working on a fleet of delivery robots called Serve.
Serve robots will "work alongside the existing Postmates fleet to move small objects over short distances efficiently," a blog post last year said, adding the Lidar-equipped robots will travel at walking speed, run on electricity and bypass congestion by traveling on sidewalks.
Postmates' robots can carry up to 50 pounds of weight, and have a touchscreen for interactions.
