Starship Robots Roll on to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
The school will cover robot delivery fees for the next two years!
Today marks a couple of firsts for Starship’s delivery robots as the roll on to the campus of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. It’s Starship’s first college partnership in North Carolina, and its first partnership with a historically Black college or universtity (HBCU).
The new robot delivery service is being done through foodservice provider Sodexo, and will see a fleet of 20 autonomous, on-demand robots deliver from three restaurants on campus. Starting today, NC A&T students, staff and faculty can order food from Qdoba, 1891 Bistro and Paavo’s Pizza using the Starship Food Delivery app.
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The new robot delivery will work in conjunction with student meal plans and in a nice move we don’t recall seeing elsewhere, the university is covering the delivery fees for students for the next two years (so place those orders!).
For the past few years, Starship has been aggressively rolling out delivery robots to college campuses across the country including George Mason University, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and Northern Arizona University.
College campuses make great service areas for robot deliveries. They have large populations in constrained areas that eat at all hours. They have well manicured walkways. And robots can easily get to areas on campuses where car-based deliveries cannot.
Starship recently announced that its global fleet of 1000 robots had completed two million autonomous deliveries worldwide including 220,000 coffees and 106,000 pizzas.
Recently we’ve seen a new wrinkle in college robot delivery with the addition of autonomous stores. Over at Loyola Marymount University, StoreXapp’s robot-run convenience stores are filling Kiwibot delivery robots (also working with Sodexo) with snacks and goods for an automated end-to-end retail experience.
Given NC A&T is a technical school, perhaps students there can build their own robot retail experience as well.