Oh Lord, won't you buy me autonomous vans?

14th September 2016

Nat Bowers

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Starship Technologies, a start-up trying to transform delivery with its fleet of friendly robots, has announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz Vans to develop the world’s first transportation system to integrate specially-adapted vans with autonomous delivery robots to allow efficient delivery of goods in neighbourhoods.

The ’Robovan’ concept is actually fairly straightforward: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans will act as ’motherships’ for the eight onboard delivery robots. The vans will drive through certain areas, stopping in designated locations - based on delivery density and demand - to drop off and pick up robots to complete customer deliveries.

Rather than drive to an area and spend all day delivering approximately 180 packages door-to-door, the ’Robovan’ will instead drive to pre-agreed locations to load and unload goods and then dispatch the robots in the final step for on-demand delivery. After making the delivery, the robots will then autonomously find their way back to the van for re-loading.

According to Allan Martinson, Chief Operating Officer, Starship: “By leaving the door-to-door part to delivery robots the van drivers’ productivity will significantly rise while reducing congestion on the streets and CO₂ emissions.”

The ’Robovan’ will use a racking system to load the robots and their goods, enabling 400 packages to be delivered every 9 hour shift. This is an increase of over 120%.

'Robovan'

“We see a huge potential for robotic delivery systems in the future and by combining our vans and the robots – we call it the mothership concept. With this we are able to increase the efficiency of delivery by an order of magnitude. Working together is like having best of both worlds – the power of a leading van manufacturer combined with the agility and spirit of a start-up,” said Volker Mornhinweg, Head of Mercedes-Benz Vans.

Starship Technologies’ delivery robots have now covered over 12,000km around the world in 12 countries and 47 cities, coming into contact with over 1.2 million people.