While Londoners get excited about driverless taxis finally showing up, 50 miles to the north west people have been summoning droids for nearly a decade.
In Milton Keynes, people already live alongside robots. If it’s anything to go by, the future is less about flying cars, and more about ordering a pack of chewing gum from a bot that will sing you Happy Birthday.
‘We love them,’ Steph Wells, the manager of Monkston Park Co-op tells Metro while surveying her shop’s fleet of four Starship robots lined up outside on the pavement.
Each one looks like a small chest freezer on wheels, with a flag signalling its presence, and curved edges to so it looks cute rather than threatening.
Delivery robots are set to become a common sight, whether they’re dogs crouching down to crap out parcels, or drones dropping Amazon orders from the sky.
But in Milton Keynes, the most shocking thing is how quickly they blend into the background.
As I ordered one of them to bring me some dried mango, a chicken wrap and a packet of biscuits (there was a minimum price to get a reduced delivery fee), a woman noticed me filming and shouted ‘Taking your pet robot for a walk? There’s a good boy!’
Other than that, nobody looked surprised at a futuristic little box on wheels crossing the road alone. They were as blase as they would have been watching someone use a vending machine.
Steph, whose shop was one of the first to get the robots after the city’s rollout in 2018, said: ‘It’s amazing how well people have adjusted.
‘If my dear grandad was alive and he saw there were robots bringing our milk and bread, it would be like watching an episode of Star Trek.’
As well as keeping an eye on stock and dealing with customer complaints, Steph fulfills orders coming in on an app by collecting the items, putting them inside the robots, and scanning a QR code to send them on their way.
Whoever asked for one can track it on an app like an Uber arriving, then press a button when it arrives to lift up the lid and accept their order. The robots navigate on their own, though a human can take over the controls if necessary.
While they must go slowly enough to exist alongside pedestrians on the pavement, following one after it gets going requires a sustained power walk, maybe even a jog. By far the slowest aspect of their work is waiting for the humans to pack the groceries.
The bots had lofty beginnings. Co-founder Ahti Heinla, also one of the developers of Skype, entered a NASA competition to build a robot which could pick up dust and rock samples in space.
After losing, he realised his robots could be put to use doing short deliveries on Earth instead. So they ended up in Milton Keynes instead: a perfect illustration of the phrase, ‘Shoot for the Moon, and even if you miss you’ll end up among the stars’?
Last month, Uber Eats launched takeaway deliveries using the robots in Leeds, and they’re a common sight in the US too. In total they have completed over 9 million deliveries globally.
Lurking around one of their bases in Emerson Valley, I asked passers-by what they made of their new neighbours.
Sue Wallace, 73, said people are ‘protective’ of the robots because they are cute, ‘just like K9 in Doctor Who’, a robotic dog that the Doctor had as a pet.
‘I find it quite novel that people are like, “Oh, my God, what’s that?” I mean, we’ve had them for years’, she added, saying most people find them ‘handy’ though she doesn’t use them herself.
Anne McCabe, 55, uses the robots four or five times a year, and would do it more often if she didn’t already work near a supermarket.
‘At the beginning it was novelty value,’ she said. But then she realised they were actually useful, for last-minute ingredients, if she’s not feeling well, ‘or it’s just a Saturday night treat’.
She added: ‘They’re handy for old people as well, or if you’ve got a baby at home.’
Her two teenagers also like using the robots, and say friends have stepped in and helped them if they go off piste.
‘Sometimes you do see them getting stuck on the pavement, and think ‘oh, is it okay?’ And then they do make their way up the curb again,’ Anne said.
Are these robots cute?
-
That’s just what they want you to think
Not everyone we met was a fan of the robots, with one man saying he regularly saw them around but thought it was ‘lazy’ of people to turn to a robot: ‘You can’t get on a bike or walk around – how desperate have you got to be for a pint of milk?’
Lisa Johnson, a vice president at Starship Technologies, has a theory about why the robots have been so accepted in Milton Keynes, met with a shrug or a smile rather than Terminator fears.
‘They’re very non-threatening, and they’re very, very polite,’ she told Metro. ‘But as well, they’re not designed to look like something else that already exists.’
Some are unsure about the ‘uncanny valley’ nature of humanoid robots, while with a driverless car, they are ‘used to someone being sat in the driving seat, and then suddenly there’s not,’ she said.
But a white box on wheels that says please, thank you, and ‘very kind!’ doesn’t cause the same perception issues.
Their gradual introduction has also played a role, she thinks, as with a 2 to 3km delivery radius, they’ve been spread out enough that nobody felt like ‘the robots are coming’.
Asked if she thinks we’ll be seeing robots of all kinds within ten years, she does, ‘and we should give humans more credit than we do, perhaps, about the ability to embrace change’. ‘If your economy’s good and your robots are well behaved, very, very quickly, you accept them and just start to treat them as normal.’
The robots rely on the goodwill of strangers if they find themselves trapped half on and half off a kerb, or stuck behind an awkwardly-parked rental e-scooter. Unfailingly polite, they can ask for help with microphones, and then say ‘thank you’ once they’re back on the move.
Hoping to hear this myself, I stood blocking one’s path to see how it would react. Disappointly, it did nothing except stop, until I felt I was in a stand-off, waiting for it to either run me over or ask me to get out of the way. After it eventually stared me down, I sheepishly stepped aside.
I didn’t go this far with robot bothering, but they employ a similar strategy if someone sits on them, simply stopping where they are until the person gets back up.
Looking at what people are buying with their robots, Steph says it’s mainly about convenience.
‘You tend to see it in the morning, especially over the weekend,’ she said, when people are ordering breakfast pastries.
‘It can be anything from an energy drink or a stick of chewing gum to about 20 items, and then it’s almost like playing Jenga to see how much we can fit safely into a robot.
‘On an average day, you’re looking at anywhere up to 20 deliveries, and on a busy day around 30.’
When ‘my’ robot arrived, I asked it to sing me Happy Birthday, and it waited at the end of its assignment to play a jazzy version of the tune, before turning and whirring away.
On a grey and bitterly cold day waiting on a pavement, it didn’t feel very Hollywood, with no lasers, electrical sparks or polished metal, just a lid to lift up on a self-wheeling box with tinny speakers.
But the robots have arrived, and will probably be on your street soon too.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: ChatGPT wants your medical records – these are the risks
MORE: Hand-held robot makes tooth brushing ‘less stressful’ as it will do it for you
MORE: ‘See-through bikini loophole meant Grok AI generated images of my genitalia’
