Sidewalk-robot startup celebrates 1 million deliveries

Enlarge / Annika Keeton. (credit: Starship)

Last March, just as the Washington, DC, area was locking down for COVID-19, I traveled to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, to eat a hamburger delivered by a robot.

The robot was owned by delivery startup Starship. Today, Starship announced that it has completed 1 million deliveries. Annika Keeton, a college student in Bowling Green, Ohio, was Starship's millionth customer.

In recent years, a lot of hype has followed companies like Waymo and Tesla as they try to build full-size, go-anywhere self-driving cars. But designing these vehicles has proven fiendishly difficult. Tesla's self-driving software still requires careful supervision, while Waymo's driverless taxis are still limited to one corner of the Phoenix metropolitan area.

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