If you live in the Swiss municipality of Regensdorf, you may soon be getting packages delivered to your doorstep by a robot. The region is the location of a field test that was just launched by Swiss Post, grocery delivery company Migros Online, and robotics firm RIVR.
Regular readers of our site may already be familiar with the ANYmal robot, developed at Switzerland's ETH Zurich university. The quadruped bot has four legs that can be equipped with wheels instead of conventional foot pads.
When those wheels are locked up, they serve as rubber-treaded feet, allowing the robot to climb stairs, step over obstacles, and walk across rough terrain. When the wheels are free to spin, they allow the robot to zip across smooth, flat surfaces (such as pavement) much faster and more energy-efficiently than it could if it were walking.
Well, RIVR ONE is a commercial version of ANYmal, manufactured by ETH spinoff company RIVR (formerly Swiss-Mile). Guided by hardware such as LiDAR, optical cameras and GPS, it's able to autonomously make its way along city streets, avoiding obstacles while carrying a payload in a locked cargo box on its back.
In the new Regensdorf trial, RIVR ONE robots will be hitching rides in Swiss Post delivery vans, then carrying select Swiss Post parcels and Migros Online grocery deliveries from those vans to clients' doorsteps. And although the robots will be doing so autonomously, humans will be supervising, so they can step in and take over if necessary.
"This initiative gives us the opportunity to understand how autonomous delivery systems might support our people and processes," says Pascal Stalder, Project Lead at Swiss Post. "We’re especially interested in the potential to reduce walking distances and heavy lifting – while continuing to deliver the service quality our customers expect."
And in fact, this is not the first field test of RIVR ONE.
Earlier this year, the robots were used to deliver food orders from restaurants in Zurich (see the video below), and to deliver parcels in Austin, Texas.
Source: RIVR
