GrubHub has launched a new robot delivery service that it thinks will make delivering at college campuses a little easier.
The delivery service is available at the University of Kentucky, the University of Nevada, the University of Las Vegas among others, according to GrubHub, which was founded in Chicago nearly 20 years ago.
The robots can travel up to 4 miles per hour and carry the equivalent of three bags of groceries, rain or shine, the company said. GrubHub has partnered with autonomous delivery services provider Starship to bring 200 robots that are in use across seven campuses.
Adam Herbert, senior director of campus partnerships with GrubHub, said the company is scaling the delivery service quickly with seven universities already on board and another five slated to launch in the next few months.
At some of the large state schools, the robots can do several hundred deliveries a day, GrubHub said.
“Campuses are notoriously difficult for cars to navigate and there’s limited parking. So what we are finding is that with the robots, they can navigate the streets easier and get to those hard-to-reach places,” he told Chicago Inno. “There’s a lot of buzz right now with robots, and everyone finds a fun way to get their food.”
This comes as FedEx has recently decided to “step back” from the research and development program for a same-day delivery bot as some companies don’t think all the kinks are worked out quite yet in the delivery service.
Herbert agreed that consumers in the general marketplace have a harder time seeing how robots can be widely adopted for delivery, but GrubHub is taking “a different approach” by working in closed ecosystems that are in an isolated area, like a college campus.
He said college students are a great market for the robots to start because that’s where the demand for these types of technologies and innovations are likely to start.
This story has been updated to clarify the number of Starship robots GrubHub is using on college campuses.
