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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery robots

Food Tech Show Live: Shake Shack, Delivery Bots & Cultivated Meat

Listeners of the Food Tech Show podcast know that in addition to our regular interviews with smart leaders in the food tech space, we also like to get together once a week on the podcast to talk about the top stories in food tech.

And now, this weekly wrapup includes a live studio audience (kind of) on Clubhouse. Like many other food tech and future food nerds, we’ve been having lots of fun over on the social audio app, and one of the best parts is the live interaction with listeners.

If you’re on Clubhouse, make sure to join us weekly every Friday at 1 Pacific on Clubhouse by following the Food Tech Live club. Here’s the link to this coming Friday’s show so make sure to add it to your calendar.

But before you do that, you’ll want to check out last week’s show (with special guest commentator Zoe Leavitt). The stories we discuss on Friday include:

If you’d like to listen to our latest news wrapup, you can do so now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or just by clicking play below.

Bizero Rolls Out Delivery Robots to Help Prevent Driver Deaths in Turkey

There are lots of reasons that delivery robot companies launch their services. Faster food deliveries. A attempt to make delivery more available. One of the main reasons Bizero launched its robot delivery service in Istanbul, Turkey was to help prevent the rampant death of delivery drivers there.

Mehmet Akincilar, Founder of Bizero told me by video chat this week that delivery driver deaths in Turkey is a big problem and that he wanted to deploy his robots to help. According an article in the Turkish publication, Duvar from Feb 2020, “75 of the 103 motorcyclists who died in traffic accidents were delivery drivers” (the publication did not specify where in Turkey or a specific timeframe).

Additionally, the Duvar post said:

While it is estimated that 100,000 motorcyclist delivery drivers are currently working in Turkey, at least 50,000 are believed to be working under the table. Those working informally get paid less, and usually these workers are immigrants or high school students on summer break. While a delivery driver can make between 150-200 TL a day, immigrants and drivers without licenses are paid only 50-60 TL a day

This is where Bizero comes. Akincilar and his team are using self-balancing two-wheeled robots, dubbed PIKA (“Paylaşımlı İnsansız Kargo Aracı,” or “Shared Unmanned Cargo Vehicle”), to make food deliveries in Istanbul. The robots aren’t currently the most high-tech robots we’ve covered (they use an actual padlock on the cargo door and recipients are texted the combination), but they appear to get the job done.

Delivery Robot carries greengrocery at Turkish Bazaar, Istanbul | Bizero cooperation w/Pazardan App

The PIKAs have a range of 100 kilometers on a charge, can carry 30 kgs worth of stuff, and have a maximum speed of 10 kmh. Bizero’s robots are semi-autonomous, so there is a human pilot that plots the course for the robot (they are not fully driven by teleoperators). One person can pilot up to five robots at a time. This also means that robots won’t fully replace humans in the workforce, as some drivers can move into working as robot teleoperators.

The program was launched last July, and Bizero has 10 robots making deliveries around Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Akincilar says that the company will have 100 robots making deliveries by the end of this year (and that they will have digital locks).

Bizero’s business model is to sell the robots outright. There is no subscription or per mile fee, just selling robots to delivery services, restaurants, markets, etc. Pricing was not disclosed.

Bizero is actually the second delivery robot company operating in Istanbul right now. Delivers AI uses four-wheeled autonomous ‘bots and also plans to have a fleet of 100 robots making deliveries in a year’s time. Unlike Delivers AI, however, Bizero is bootstrapped.

Given the mortality issues with delivery drivers in Turkey, having more robots making deliveries in Turkey seems like a good thing.

Imperium Drive Comes Out of Stealth with Bandwidth-Aware Teleoperation for Robots

One of the many questions facing delivery robot startups as they come to market is how much autonomy to give the robots. Should they go full autonomous driving, even though that is more technically complex and there is still a patchwork of regulation that needs to be dealt with? Or should they go with less autonomy and use humans to help guide or even drive their robots to sidestep some of the complications that come with self-driving vehicles.

For robot delivery startups wrestling with these questions, Imperium Drive says it’s here to help. Based in Europe (the company is scattered across different countries because of the pandemic) and part of the TechStars Smart Mobility cohort, Imperium Drive makes a teleoperation system for autonomous vehicles, including the small rover robots favored by the likes of Starship, Kiwibot, Postmates and others.

Imperium does the whole teleoperation stack, from the software onboard the robot to the human on the other end who helps the robot navigate. Imperium lets robot companies choose how much teleoperation they want, depending on their robot’s level of autonomy. Imperium can have a human simply monitor the robot remotely in case it gets stuck or runs into trouble, or the company can plot points on a map for the robot to autonomously follow. At the far end of the spectrum, Imperium can have a human actually drive the delivery robot remotely, like a videogame.

Imperium Drive Co-Founder and CEO, Koosha Kaveh, told me by phone this week that his company’s secret sauce is its ability to operate even when network connections provide only low bandwidth. As the robot runs around town, the strength of its cellular connection will vary, sometimes offering very small pipes for data to get through.

“We’ve developed our own AI predictive engine that predicts changes of network parameters,” said Kaveh, “And we change automatically our streaming engine based on availability.”

A easy way to think about Imperium’s bandwidth technology is Netflix. The movie streaming service will detect how much bandwidth you have (e.g., a cellular connection versus wired Ethernet) and serve a movie in a resolution fit for that situation. Imperium does the same thing, just with data from the robot.

Delivery robots are actually streaming a lot of data back to their headquarters. There’s video from the robot’s on-board cameras as well as lidar and radar information. Imperium adapts what is streamed based on the amount of bandwidth. For example, if there’s very little bandwidth, Imperium can send just wireframes of the robots surroundings. Kaveh said that it can stream the relevant information a teleoperator needs at under 1MB of data.

The idea of teleoperating robots brings up the question of scale. It’s easy to understand self-driving robots scaling up to meet demand because that’s the whole point — there is no human labor to pay. Once you have the robots, they can just run around the clock with no additional cost. What happens to the economics when you have a human handling a robot?

Kaveh says Imperium has a network of inexpensive labor in Eastern Europe that it can tap into to teleoperate robots. And Imperium isn’t alone in using humans to guide robots. Kiwibot has a team of people in Colombia that plots the courses for its robots (not full-on driving). And Tortoise skipped the idea of self-driving altogether for its robots, believing it can create a Mechanical Turk style army of human gig-work teleoperators.

The fact that Imperium Drive exists is at least some indication that the delivery robot space is maturing. As we outlined in our Delivery Robot Market Report, there are many companies around the world deploying delivery robots on city streets. Imperium Drive is part of a typical business cycle for new market categories like delivery bots. It’s not creating the robots themselves, but adding a layer to make those robots run more efficiently. As robots gain traction, we’ll see more third-party add-ons like this meant to improve robot delivery operations.

Report: Uber Looking to Spin Off Postmates X Delivery Robot Biz

As part of its acquisition of Postmates last year, Uber got into the delivery robot business. Now, according to a report in TechCrunch, Uber is planning to get out of the robo-biz by spinning off Postmates X (the robotics division of the company) into a separate company.

From TechCrunch:

Postmates X, the robotics division of the on-demand delivery startup that Uber acquired last year for $2.65 billion, is seeking investors in its bid to become a separate company, according to several people familiar with the plans.

The new spinout is being called Serve Robotics, named after the companies’ autonomous, cooler-sized Serve robot, which was making deliveries in Los Angeles throughout much of 2020. More recently, Postmates Serve was enlisted by the Pink Dot market to make deliveries in West Hollywood.

TechCrunch reports that Serve Robotics would retain the IP and assets, and Uber would keep a 25 percent stake in the company.

Given how the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing restaurants and grocers to adopt more contactless delivery methods, it may seem like an odd time for Uber to get out of the delivery robot business.

As we’ve been chronicling, autonomous delivery robots are popping up all over the globe. Starship has been doing deliveries on college campuses for more than a year, and expanded to grocery delivery in Modesto, CA. Kiwibot partnered with the City of San Jose for robot restaurant deliveries there. Then there’s Yandex in Russia, Delivers AI in Turkey, and Woowa Brothers in Seoul, South Korea.

But as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.

While the use of robotics is definitely on the rise around the world, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before they become mainstream. Regulations and production scale are two biggies. Right now there are a patchwork of rules around autonomous delivery that vary from city to city and state to state. Even as those get ironed out, scaling robots to a number where we see them across the country is still a huge undertaking.

Uber pushing those issues off on to a separate company means Uber can focus more on its own delivery and ridesharing businesses. Uber can then just license the robot technology to facilitate its food delivery.

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.

Refraction’s “Goldilocks” Size Could Make it Pretty Great for Robot Grocery Delivery

Contactless delivery as a concept, didn’t exist prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The phrase describes the way of delivering food and other goods without humans having to interact with or touch one another.

Delivery robots hold the promise of taking contactless delivery one step further, by removing humans from the equation altogether. Over in Ann Arbor, MI, Refraction.ai launched its robot fleet for restaurant lunch delivery earlier this year, and this month started piloting a grocery delivery service.

Refraction builds the REV-1, an autonomous three-wheeled delivery robot that is ruggedized so that it can handle inclement weather. The company has eight robots rolling through a 3.5 mile radius around Ann Arbor right now making deliveries , with another 15 robots being manufactured.

I first came across Refraction’s grocery work in a WIRED article about the delivery fees Refraction was charging. So I hopped on the phone with Refraction Co-Founder, Ram Vasudevan, to find out more about its grocery program and catch up with the company.

According to Vasudevan, Refraction has partnered with a local grocery store called the Produce Station and has another grocery partner coming online soon. The program is currently being tested and is not yet open to the public, but for now, customers are directed to a special website created by Refraction where they can shop online for food items just as they would from any retailer. A robot is dispatched to the store where a worker there packs it with the order (a REV-1 can hold six grocery bags). The robot is then sent off to the house for delivery with a text message alerting the shopper when the robot has arrived.

The Refraction robot isn’t completely contactless, however. Recipients still need to touch the robot to unlock it, something Vasudevan says the company is working on. Refraction is also looking to add UV lights to the cargo cavity to help with sanitization.

Refraction isn’t the only company that is doing robotic food delivery. Starship’s cooler-sized robots have been doing grocery delivery in Milton Keynes, England, and are now doing restaurant delivery in U.S. cities like Tempe, AZ and Fairfax, VA. And Nuro was given the greenlight by California to start testing its autonomous pod vehicles, which about half the size of a regular car, for deliveries as well.

But one advantage Refraction’s robot may have is its “Goldilocks”-like size. It stands five feet tall and is narrow enough to travel in the bike lanes on roads . This could potentially make it more friendly to city regulators who don’t want their sidewalks clogged with robots. It could also prove more attractive than a pod, because the robot can skooch off to the side to make way for traffic, and have an easier time finding enough space to park.

Vasudevan said that Refraction was “overwhelmed” with interest from restaurants when it launched that delivery option earlier this year. As the company moves past the testing phase, it’s going to have quite a bit of contact with grocers as well.

LG and Woowa Bros. to Develop Food Delivery and Serving Robots

South Korean companies LG and Woowa Brothers announced today that they will work together on developing robots that deliver food to tables at restaurants as well as to your front door (hat tip to The Investor).

The companies didn’t provide many specifics, just saying that there were synergies between the two and they looked forward to making a better world where robots and humans coexist.

The move isn’t surprising given that both companies have made numerous robotic moves in parallel up to this point. Just earlier this month South Korean restaurant chain CJ Foodville started deploying LG’s CLoi ServeBots at its locations to serve food and shuttle empty dishes.

For its part Woowa Brothers, which operates Baedal Minjok, South Korea’s largest food delivery operation, launched a robot rental program for restaurants in November of last year. And last summer, Woowa partnered with UCLA to develop cooking robots. Woowa was acquired by Delivery Hero for $4 billion last December, but prior to that, Woowa’s CEO had talked openly about how delivery robots should be multi-taskers and do things like take away trash and recycling.

The announcement comes amid the backdrop of the deadly coronavirus. Cases in South Korea have spiked, and as the disease becomes a global pandemic, robots are one measure being taken to reduce human-to-human contact. As we saw early in the virus’ spread, a quarantined hotel in China used robots to serve food to stranded travelers. In fact, robots could wind up being instrumental in the contactless method of food delivery, if proper sterilization procedures can be put into place.

LG certainly isn’t alone in its food robot endeavors. Sony has a big vision for cooking robots and partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to research them. Sony also recently launched a dedicated artificial intelligence unit that would work on “gastronomy.”

All of this is to say that with the intense focus from companies like LG, Woowa, Sony and more, the world of food delivery and restaurant robots is being primed to undergo massive advancements in the coming years.

Legal Considerations Before Deploying Autonomous Delivery Robots

The following is a guest post written by Ariel Yehezkel and Allison Wu Troianos of the law firm Sheppard Mullin.

With e-commerce consumer expectations constantly rising with the ubiquity of same-day delivery, startups and established corporations alike are focusing on developing and investing in efficient last-mile delivery and e-commerce fulfillment solutions. Specifically, online grocery retail is one of the most rapidly growing e-commerce sectors for home delivery, with a projected 70 percent of consumers purchasing their groceries online and a market value of $100 billion within the next two to four years. Consequently, there is also a trend towards acquisition activity focused on disrupting and supplementing traditional logistics systems and developing technologies that facilitate various aspects of the direct-to-consumer grocery supply chain as corporations seek to secure a foothold in the market.

Several companies are using sorting robots in warehouses to assist in order fulfillment and other companies have been using and developing autonomous delivery robots that facilitate the last-mile logistics of direct-consumer-delivery.

With these technological developments come novel legal questions that potential acquirers or investors that develop and manufacture delivery robots and that use robotic systems in warehouses need to consider.  Such legal considerations include tort liability, privacy and data protection issues and regulatory concerns regarding traffic and motorized vehicle laws.

Tort law in many legal systems would impose liability on the person or entity in control of a device that causes damage. Therefore, liability in the event of a traffic accident or other tortious activity caused by a delivery robot would likely fall on the company that was controlling or steering the delivery robot at the time of the incident. Further, the designer or manufacturer of a delivery robot that injures a pedestrian or damages property could also be held liable under the theory of strict product liability if an injured party alleged that the robot was dangerous due to a defect in their manufacturing or design. Under a strict product liability theory, such injured party could argue that a reasonable person would not expect a small robot autonomously operating on the sidewalk without a conspicuous design feature such as a flag, which in turn creates unlawfully dangerous situations for pedestrians or drivers.

However, traditional civil liability frameworks may not be sufficient enough to address the potential issues that may arise from accidents or damage caused by delivery robots. The level of autonomy of robots and the level of influence humans have over their operation could affect how liability is allocated, as current tort laws assume human involvement in the operation of robots. As innovations enable robots to become more autonomous, current liability frameworks may not be able to adequately assign liability because the more autonomous a robot is, the less it can be treated simply as a tool of a human user.  It is yet to be seen how legal frameworks will evolve to account for liability arising from damage caused by autonomous delivery robots, but they will necessarily need to adapt as technological advances make it possible for robots to operate without as much human control or oversight.

Privacy and data protection issues could be implicated due to delivery robots using camera recording and collecting other consumer data through the delivery process. Certain federal, state and local laws restrict and regulate data collection and retention, so companies must be aware of all relevant data protection regulations and make sure any data delivery robots collect is handled in compliance with such regulations.

For example, the collection of personal data is restricted and regulated under certain data protection laws, which would include any information relating to an identifiable natural person. An individual may need to be given with notice or be required to give consent if their personal data will be collected, and the controller of such collected data would be the principal party responsible for compliance with the applicable privacy law. Any personal data collected and transmitted by a delivery robot, including the consumer’s address and biographical data, and any pictures, video or audio recordings, would need to be stored and processed in compliance with applicable privacy laws.

Certain local and state regulations regarding motor vehicles will also need to adapt to accommodate autonomous delivery robots, especially if they operate in public traffic. States have been adopting statutes permitting delivery robots up to a certain weight limit to operate on sidewalks and crosswalks. Starship Technologies, a leading company in the robot delivery space, has been actively involved in getting legislation passed in various states such as Virginia and Idaho. Starship has been advocating for proposals that allow Starship’s robots to operate, but that would exclude some of its competitors’ products from autonomous operation due to weight limits or other restrictions. Starship has demonstrated its robots in hearings for these proposed bills, which set forth the parameters for legal operation of these delivery robots, such as restricting their weight, requiring robots to have their own insurance and requiring a certain level of human monitoring, which could implicate some of the data privacy or liability issues discussed above.

Though several states have adopted such legislation, densely populated urban areas have been slower to follow suit. It could be quite some time before some large cities such as New York City pass legislation allowing delivery robots to operate in their streets and sidewalks.  Reportedly, when a same-day delivery robot appeared in Manhattan in November 2019, New York City officials promptly issued a cease and desist order, claiming that the delivery robots violated vehicle and traffic laws that prohibit self-driving cars and motor vehicles on sidewalks, and citing job loss and traffic congestion as their main concerns. Other critics cite accessibility and safety issues, asserting that the delivery robots pose undue obstacles to the disability community and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The growth in the autonomous delivery space has been exponential over the last several years and is expected to continue to grow as home grocery delivery becomes the standard. The legal considerations raised above are not necessarily roadblocks to further autonomous delivery innovation, but compliance with all relevant regulations and potential liability concerns should be taken into account as companies continue their foray into the autonomous delivery space and as investors continue to invest and acquire such companies. 

Ariel Yehezkel is the Practice Group Leader of Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate practice group. Allison Wu Troianos is an associate in the firm’s Corporate practice group. They regularly handle transactions in food and beverage industry, and have developed extensive knowledge in this sector. They can be reached at ayehezkel@sheppardmullin.com and atroianos@sheppardmullin.com, respectively.

Starship Delivery Robots Officially Roll Out (Again) at University of Pittsburgh

As of this week, robot-powered food and drink delivery are fully a part of college life at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). After several months of testing (and stopping tests), Pitt now has a fleet of 30 Starship robots autonomously running around campus feeding hungry students and staff.

To get the robot, users order from seven participating campus eateries through the Starship deliveries app. For a $1.99 fee, a cooler-sized robot will wheel across campus to bring the food directly to the person.

Starship’s robots made their debut on Pitt’s campus last September, but the program was temporarily halted just a month later after two separate incidents of the self-driving robots reportedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

Pitt pulled Starship’s robots off campus for further review. We reached out to Starship to see what adjustments the company made in response to the accessibility incidents and a company spokesperson responded with a terse “Starship reviewed the mapping of that intersection.”

The real world will bring about all sorts of issues for delivery robots that weren’t necessarily foreseeable, and they are issues that society will have to deal with and figure out in real time. But robots will become an increasingly common part of the college experience for students over the next couple of years. In addition to Pitt, Starship’s robots are making deliveries at George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Wisconsin, and other homes of higher education. Elsewhere, Chowbotics has been sending its Sally, the salad making robot, off to a number of different colleges to feed students around the clock.

Though autonomous robot delivery at colleges is very much still in its infancy, it has the power to be a real game changer. The ability to order food on demand and have it brought directly to you wherever you are on campus in undeniably convenient (post-party pizza, anyone?). But it’s also training an entire generation of early tech adopters (read: the youngs) to interact with robots, and perhaps, expect them once they leave school.

How Will Winter Affect Autonomous Delivery Robots? Snow Problem!

A lot of work in autonomous robots is done in places like Scottsdale, Houston and the Bay Area. What places like Scottsdale, Houston and the Bay Area have in common is that they have mild-to-nonexistant winters. But up north in Michigan and Wisconsin, where it’s already snowing, autonomous delivery bots from Refraction AI and Starship are being put to the test.

Refraction is based out of Ann Arbor, MI, and it’s three-wheeled REV-1 robot has been designed to travel in bad weather. As we wrote around the time of its launch:

…Refraction AI combines software and hardware to battle bad weather. First is the environmental scanning provided by a 12-camera setup as well as ultrasound and radar sensors on the REV-1. To make the robot less expensive, the REV-1 foregoes the LIDAR systems popular with other autonomous robots. And according to Johnson-Roberson, Refraction AI’s camera rig also allows the robot to track things not on the ground like buildings and cars to navigate even when road lines are not visible. The other way the REV-1 takes on bad weather is rather low tech. “We’re using fat bike tires a low PSI so they are squishy,” said Johnson-Roberson. “They can run in snow and rain.”

But it’s one thing to describe how a robot will work in inclement weather; it’s another to see it in action. Thankfully, the folks at Refraction shot a video of its robot on a snow-covered road a couple of weeks back and shared it with The Spoon. Check it out:

Refraction.AI’s REV-1 (Pity the cyclist following it)

While that video doesn’t show it taking turns or hills, or having to deal with traffic, it certainly looks like the REV-1 can handle slushy conditions. Which is actually good news all around. Barring the arrival of a blizzard, hungry folks can order meals for delivery guilt-free because they aren’t forcing someone to drive or ride in the snow, and restaurants can still earn delivery revenue when the weather turns.

Elsewhere in the midwest, the students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are just now learning whether or not that town’s snowy weather will keep the newly arrived Starship robots from making food deliveries. The Wisconsin State Journal’s Just Ask Us section fielded this question this week: Will UW-Madison’s food delivery robots get stuck in the snow?

The answer was pretty straightforward and filled with the type of common sense you’d expect from a Midwesterner:

On days when there are blizzards or icy conditions that would make the sidewalks unnavigable for people, the delivery robots will not operate. When students go on the app to order food, it would show that the marketplaces are closed

A spokesperson for the university goes on to say that since the robots were designed with a low-profile and traction tires that could handle Estonian weather, they should be able to handle a Wisconsin winter. (If you go to UWM, send us a photo or video of the robot in snowy action).

The weather outside may be frightful, but putting robots through these harsh weather paces means that they’ll be available in more places beyond Houston, Phoenix and the Bay Area in the near future.

Woowa Bros. to Rent Out In-Restaurant Bots that Deliver Food to Your Table

When we’ve written about Korean company Woowa Bros.’ robotic ambitions in the past, it’s been around delivering food from restaurants to your customers’ own homes. But the company announced a new plan on Monday to have its Dilly ‘bots deliver food inside restaurants to your table, too.

The Aju Business Daily reports that Woowa is launching a robot rental program wherein restaurants can pay 900,000 won (~$773 USD) per month with a two-year contract.

Aju Business Daily is light on details, saying only that the Dilly can carry food to four tables at a time and bus dirty dishes back to the kitchen. That sounds a lot like the Penny robot Bear Robotics offers (and tested out at a Pizza Hut in Seoul last year). Woowa is an investor in Bear Robotics, and we’ve reached out to Bear’s to see if its technology is involved in Woowa’s new offering.

As off-premises dining continues to play an increasingly important role for restaurants, many players look to build autonomous robots for food delivery (Postmates, Kiwi, Starship, etc.). There aren’t as many focused on in-store dining, which presents an opportunity for companies like Woowa and Bear.

Woowa Brothers operates the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery app in South Korea, and the company has not been shy about building out its robot fleet. Last December the company received a $320 million investment round in part to help it develop more autonomous robots, and this past July the company formed a partnership with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots.