From ‘new’ to ‘normal’: Building social acceptance is crucial to the growth of autonomous technologies
Starship Technologies is celebrating our 10th birthday this year.
Our first robots roamed the streets of Greenwich back in 2016 - with a robot handler in tow - because at that stage they hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the world. We’ve come a long way since though! As of today, the robots have made over 6 million deliveries, travelling over 13 million kilometres and making a crossing three times every second around the world.
We are an Estonian company (founded by Skype alumni Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis), but in many ways a global success story, with the UK at the forefront.
We first piloted commercial deliveries here in the UK, with Just Eat, Hermes Logistics and a number of local retailers. Our first steps into grocery delivery were with a single Co-op store in Milton Keynes, way back in 2018. We knew we were onto something when the store ran out of stock during the first launch days!
Since those early days of Starship, we’ve expanded to Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester with Co-op. Globally, we operate in more than 80 locations with a fleet of over 2,000 autonomous robots delivering hot food on US college campuses, groceries and top-up shopping in the UK, Finland and Estonia, as well as industrial supplies on large sites in Denmark and Germany.
We operate at Level 4 autonomy, which means our robots are 99% autonomous. They’re low speed, low-weight and operate on the pavements. There are huge benefits to local communities and to the economy as a whole.
Our customer research shows that in the UK, we have replaced car journeys to the tune of a 320,000kg carbon reduction. Our most regular customers are saving up to 7 days per year by ordering via Starship instead of driving to the store. And we’re great for productivity. It doesn’t make economic, societal or environmental sense to have humans deliver (relatively) low value baskets of items across (relatively) short distances.
Starship set up in the UK because it saw a country ready to embrace technology and put in place the building block to attract investment. If we’re honest, the expectations of the 2010s hasn’t really been met - mostly through a lack of a clear regulatory framework at a national level - but there’s still huge potential.
Starship has worked with councils across England who prize innovation and want to bring cutting edge tech to their communities. As we head towards a General Election, all parties should be looking at how tech regulation is moving much more quickly in other countries - particularly if the next Government wants to drive growth and productivity when the Exchequer isn’t overflowing.
Take Finland, for example. Finland has put in place a national framework and specification for ‘Light Automatic Goods Transporters’, which has supported a national Starship expansion of robot delivery across the country with Finland’s biggest retailer (S Group). This has driven sales and meant a significant investment of tech into local communities.
Not that the Finnish winter comes without challenges! We have had to help the robots learn about operating in heavy snow as the world they had learned previously had snow in it, but not the sort you see in a Finnish winter!
Hopefully advances in snow operation in Finland mean that UK winter’s will be a piece of cake in the future!
Despite the lack of regulation, our UK team is leading Europe too. Our groundbreaking wireless charging technology was installed in Cambourne, Cambridgeshire this year. Our very first European installation is a game changer for scaling a profitable, last-mile solution. When a robot is low on charge it can take itself to a wireless station, re-charge and head back to work when ready. This removes the need for robots to be transported from place to place or taken home to bed at night.
But community integration isn’t automatic. Social acceptance is won, not gifted, and there’s a lot of work that goes into being the first people to do something.
There’s the tech challenge of course, but building social acceptance, buy-in and understanding in a sector like ours is also crucial. We became so commonplace and ‘normal’ in Milton Keynes that it was easy to forget when expanding that people in new communities wouldn’t even know what a Starship robot is - you can’t just arrive in an area, put some robots onto the street and expect the community not to bat an eyelid!
We’ve worked incredibly hard with community groups, schools, older people’s forums, the police, cyclists, the British Horse Society and organisations like the RNIB, Sight Aid and Guide Dogs to create awareness, understanding and acceptance right across the community. That willingness to invest in community relations when introducing new technology can’t be underestimated.
Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of people love our robots. It helps that they’re cute - they sing (sometimes they dance too), they say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and always get into the festive spirit (they dress as reindeers at Christmas).
But none of this has happened by chance.The combination of well researched design, rigorously tested tech and proactive community engagement is how something people have never seen before becomes a trusted part of daily life. In Leeds when residents were surveyed by the council, over 75% of people said our robots were a good thing. In Cambourne, it was over 90%.
We’re proud that one of our biggest deployments in the world is in the UK - we’re looking forward to bringing Starship to more communities in the coming months and years. But just a slight nudge to an incoming government - a national regulatory framework would make it a lot easier!
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Today, he is techUK's Programme Manager for Emerging Technologies, covering dozens of technologies including metaverse, drones, future materials, robotics, blockchain, space technologies, nanotechnology, gaming tech and Web3.0.
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Rory joined techUK in June 2023 after three years in the Civil Service on its Fast Stream leadership development programme.
During this time, Rory worked on the Government's response to Covid-19 (NHS Test & Trace), school funding strategy (Department for Education) and international climate and nature policy (Cabinet Office). He also tackled the social care crisis whilst on secondment to techUK's Health and Social Care programme in 2022.
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