Spotted in Redwood City- testing Doordash delivery vehicle pic.twitter.com/uF3mBpMT7O
— Lou Hong (@louhong) March 10, 2017
They may not be the Star Wars-style droids we were looking for, but they say that every generation gets the droids it deserves.
What we've got are these boring food delivery bots from DoorDash, a San Francisco-based company using rolling drones from a company called Starship, whom we learned about last year. In the past weeks, DoorDash has deployed these babies in Redwood City, and we've got the tweets to prove it.
look at the dasher @doordash sent to my house her name is starship and i love her pic.twitter.com/JmjTflNmbu
— cametha (@cameronrebosio) March 8, 2017
According to BuzzFeed, who produced the below video on the DoorDash/StarShip robots in the field, these critters are just being used for short, one- or two-mile deliveries at this point. Asked if they posed a threat to humans, or at least their jobs, DoorDash cofounder Stanley Tang said "We’ve found that the robots are better suited to the smaller, short-distance orders that Dashers often avoid, thereby freeing up Dashers to fulfill the bigger and more complex deliveries that often result in more money for them."
Nothing to worry about, then — Move along.
Such robots, in fact these ones specifically, have already been visited upon DC according to this sighting in February. Meanwhile, a competitor, the delivery bot named Carry, was spotted on19th Street in the Mission at a similar time last month.
Ran into my first delivery robot today! @StarshipRobots @Postmates pic.twitter.com/uT0gSLQMCG
— John Bailey (@John_Bailey) February 20, 2017
Interestingly, in over 20,000 miles of testing, StarShip's robots haven't been stolen or vandalized, their CEO tells BuzzFeed. Hmm.
Clearly, extensive testing in San Francisco hasn't been performed yet.
Previously: Delivery Robot Named Carry Spotted 'Learning The Sidewalks' Of The Mission