On the East Bank, 15 robots roam the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus, offering students, faculty and staff a new way to order food delivery.

The robots are run by Starship Technologies, a company based out of the European country Estonia, according to Starship Account Manager Justin Hodoval. The University is the latest Big Ten school to work with Starship, whose robots are also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Purdue University.

“We started out doing grocery delivery in Europe,” Hodoval said. “We’re in a few countries throughout Europe and we’re very successful there. And then in 2019, we came to do business in the U.S. and we’ve now grown to almost 60 campuses across the country, the University of Minnesota being one of our newest ones.”

In the Starship app, students, faculty and staff can order from restaurants in Coffman Memorial Union including Panda Express, Starbucks, Erbert and Gerbert’s and Einstein Bros. Bagels, and can use their Gopher GOLD or Dining Dollars for orders if they so choose. 

The robots are usually in service when Coffman is open, between 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., according to Vice President of University Services Alice Roberts-Davis.

Roberts-Davis said the robots will start delivering to the University’s West Bank campus the week of Oct. 21.

“On the West Bank of campus, there is a dearth of food options, and we got a lot of requests from the faculty and staff over there, in particular, for additional food options,” Roberts-Davis said. “So that is where we arrived at the option for these robots.”

Chris Elrod, the senior director of marketing and communications for M Food Co., said the robots will also start delivering from CRAVE: Virtual Food Hall, Wild Blue Sushi, King’s Hawaiian Grill and even items from the Minnesota Marketplace, such as chips and soda, within the next few weeks.

“It is very similar to if you were to go to any other food ordering platform,” Elrod said. “It is very user-friendly, and when we receive the order in our locations, it plugs itself into the traditional queue of orders that are already coming from mobile and in-person.”

Elrod said once orders are complete, they are handed off to a Starship runner employee who places the order inside the robot. Once the lid of the robot is closed, nobody can open it except the user that it is going to, who can open it through the Starship app.

The robots estimate when a given order will be ready, and if no robots are estimated to be at the restaurant site by the time the food is ready, the app will not allow the restaurant to start the order, according to Elrod.

“It syncs up in a way that will only allow us to prepare an order when a robot is ready,” Elrod said. “The robots will also only deliver within a preset radius from certain locations based on the standard of the brand about the food being hot and fresh.”

Elrod said all of the spaces currently available for delivery are within that preset radius.

The robots have both a front and back insulation bin, Elrod said. If there is a hot item and a cold drink, they can go into separate areas of the robot to keep the temperature separate. 

Winter weather is not a large concern for Starship, Hodoval said, as business typically increases. 

“Once the weather turns and gets a little colder outside and it starts to snow, students love to order with Starship and not have to worry about walking across campus to go get their meal,” Hodoval said. 

The company is based in northern Europe and has experience with colder climates. Hodoval said the company uses two different types of tires and will be switching to winter tires with more traction to prepare for snow and ice.

Roberts-Davis said the implementation of these robots is consistent with the University’s sustainability goals.

“Our goal is to reduce our carbon footprint, and clearly if there were delivery vehicles on campus, those would be gas-powered engines,” Roberts-Davis said. “These robots are electric, so they are very sustainable, and they are rechargeable.”

Starship hires five to six students to maintain the robots and make sure they are plugged in every night.

“Starship hired some U of M engineering students to be robot fleet technicians,” Elrod said. “They wake them up every day, put them to bed and do any routine maintenance that needs to be done as the robots traverse campus.”

Roberts-Davis said the robots are not only very cautious but also very polite. Robots tend to wait a long time before they cross the street and have sensors to detect if a bicyclist, pedestrian or motor vehicle is nearby. 

Hodoval described how Starship mapped out the campus when it first introduced the robots and set a course. 

As the robots have begun to roam campus, Starship is learning the most efficient routes. With machine learning, they have applied those routes to all 15 robots. 

Hovodal said they took precautions over sidewalks that would be dangerous for fragile items like Starbucks beverages.

“The robots use a mix of computer vision and GPS to pinpoint their exact location to the nearest inch,” Hovodal said. “They also use 12 cameras, ultrasonic sensors, radar, neural networks and other technology to avoid and move around obstacles they detect.”

Elrod said the University did not make any investment into the robots, and the financial costs were covered by Chartwells, which is operated by M Food Co. 

Roberts-Davis said the robots allow students, faculty and staff to have food delivered to places where food might not usually be accessible. 

“These robots are fast and convenient,” Roberts-Davis said. “They really solve a problem for people who do not have a lot of time to entertain those food options on campus.”