Starship delivery is a company that uses robots to deliver items and food from shops to people at their homes. The company started in 2014 and quickly grew and developed into a functioning device in 2018 and already have 2,000,000 delivery completed. (you can see there entire facts and figures timeline below)
What is the Starship delivery robot?
This is the robot itself and they are designed to be completely automatous and fully functional with a mobile app, they are safe to go on their deliveries and will avoid people and objects that are in the way or obstructing it.
It's cargo bay is spacious and securely sealed with mag lock technology making it perfect for a range of different tasks from collecting grocery shopping to delivering packages at a fraction of the cost of standard delivery options.
How does it make the deliveries and manoeuvre around obstacles:
Rather than try and explain how the robots see in a incorrect paraphrasing way I will use their own words and reference in a blog post they have done.
"The first step of creating a map for delivery robots is scouting the area of interest and generating a preliminary map (2D map) on top of satellite imagery in the form of simple interconnected lines representing sidewalks (green), crossings (red), and driveways (purple) as illustrated in the image below."
"The next step involves showing the robots what the world looks like. Similar to the parent-child analogy, the robots need a little bit of hand-holding the first time they explore an area. When the robot first drives, the cameras and a multitude of sensors on the robot collect data about the world around it. These include thousands of lines which come from detecting edges of different features, for example buildings, streetlight poles and rooftops. The server can then create offline a 3D world map from these lines which the robot can then use. Like the child, the robot now has a model of the world with guide posts and it can understand where it is at any given time."
"Since our robots need to cover different areas at the same time to complete all their deliveries, to be efficient various maps need to be put together to create one unified 3D map of given area. The unified map is created piece by piece by processing the different pieces of the new area until eventually the map looks like a huge completed jigsaw puzzle. The server will put this map together based on the line data the robot collected earlier. For example, if the same rooftop was detected by two robots, then the software figures out how it connects with the rest of the map. Every colored line in the image below represents a single piece of a mapping trip added to the map."
"The final step of the mapping process, before the robots can drive fully autonomously, is to calculate exactly where and how wide the sidewalk is. This is created by processing the camera images the robot recorded while exploring the area as a reference as well as incorporating the previously created 2D map based on the satellite imagery."
This is a bit heavy on the functioning side of how robots 'see' but I think it is a very interesting and could definitely inspire work or new directions for designs in future phases of my project.