Morrisons is trialling autonomous robot deliveries from its Cambourne supermarket.
The supermarket is working with Just Eat on the new service, with robots delivering grocery orders to customers that have been made via the aggregator’s app.
Just Eat has been working with robotics firm Starship Technologies since February, to enable merchants on its platform to offer autonomous deliveries. Just Eat said Morrisons was among the first supermarkets to sign up to the service, which is mostly used by takeaway outlets.
Charlotte Exell, group online director at Morrisons, told The Grocer the supermarket was part of its effort to “continue exploring innovative ways to serve our local community”.
Shoppers ordering from the Cambourne store in Cambridgeshire, as well as three Morrisons Daily stores in Sunderland and Milton Keynes, click on a banner labelled ‘get it delivered by robot’ on the retailer’s landing page in the Just Eat app – their product options restricted to those which can fit into Starship’s six-wheeled, small fridge sized autonomous vehicles.
The customer is notified through the app when their Morrisons order is ready for delivery, and can track the robot’s movement through the Just Eat app. Once the Starship robot arrives at its destination, the customer is notified again. The customer can then retrieve their goods by unlocking the lid of the robot by pressing an ‘unlock’ button on the Just Eat app.
The robots lay in wait at a dedicated external area near the stores and upon receiving an order via Just Eat, are dispatched directly to them. The robot then waits outside the store and signals store colleagues via a dedicated device. Colleagues then pick and load the order into the robot’s secure compartment.
Once a delivery is complete, the robot either routes back to the hub or dispatches directly to the store if another delivery is queued.
Throughout the trial, shoppers ordering from the Cambourne store via the Just Eat app can have their orders delivered by robot between 9am and 9pm from Monday to Saturday or 10.30am to 3pm on Sunday.
“Our autonomous delivery trials are all about innovating to improve the customer experience - whether that’s enabling us to offer delivery in new areas like Cambourne or increase delivery capacity and speeds in the run up to Christmas. We’ll be listening closely to customer feedback on this new and exciting service,” said Caroline Bates, Grocery & Retail Director for Just Eat
Just Eat is offering robot delivery services with Starship to other merchants in parts of Cambourne, Sunderland, Milton Keynes and Barnsley.
It is not the only aggregator app offering such services. This week, Deliveroo announced it was rolling out robot deliveries to multiple cities across the UK in partnership with US robotics firm Coco.
Coco’s robots – which have a top speed of 21kph and can carry four 18-inch pizzas at a time – will begin rolling out in Canary Wharf in London this month, fulfilling orders from a small group of merchants in the area.
Deliveroo’s robot delivery fleet will soon expand to Milton Keynes, Leeds, Stockton-on-Tees and Nottingham in the coming months.
In November last year, Starship – which claims to operate “the world’s largest autonomous delivery network” with a fleet of more than 2,700 robots operating across 270 locations – partnered with Uber to offer customers autonomous food deliveries in the UK, Europe and US.
That partnership began in Leeds, before rolling out to Sheffield. The robots will be delivering Uber Eats orders in multiple European regions later this year and in the US by 2027. Uber said it “plans to expand the [UK] operating territory in the future”.
As they become an increasingly common sight in many UK towns, food delivery robots have come under fire from campaign groups like charity Living Streets, which claims the robots are putting “millions of disabled and vulnerable pedestrians” at risk.
A YouGov poll commissioned by the charity found 60% of respondents wanted the bots outlawed from pedestrian pavements. Of those, some 80% believed the robots caused problems for blind people, with a similar proportion (79%) thinking they negatively impacted pedestrians with mobility issues.
Last month, Chancellor John Healey vowed to make it easier for tech firms to test “frontier technologies” such as pavement delivery robots with new “sandboxing powers”. The powers will make it easier for companies to “safely test” such technologies, which might be currently “prevented by the system of regulation”. These new powers would be “ready to deploy across the economy next year”, Healey said.
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