Delivery robots

Back in July, the Japanese government outlined an intriguing idea to connect major cities with what sounded like a giant "conveyor belt" for cargo. Now we have a clearer picture of what that “Auto Flow Road” will look like.

In what's been called "a medical breakthrough on the verge of happening," scientists have built a soft robot with the capacity to carry different types of drugs through the body – in a device the size of a grain of rice, steered by magnetic fields.

The last time we checked in at Serve Robotics, the Uber-backed company had partnered with Alphabet's Wing for a robot-to-drone delivery service in Dallas. That was with Serve's Gen2 bot, but a faster, smarter and more robust model has just launched.

Though not exactly commonplace quite yet, rolling robots have been delivering goods to local customers for a while now. At the same time, packages have been flying overhead by drone. Now Serve Robotics and Wing Aviation are ready to merge the two.

Vayu Robotics has today unveiled its first delivery robot. The One can follow staff around stores to load up customer orders, before autonomously navigating city streets at speeds up to 20 mph to deliver the goods. Commercial deployment has begun.

Hyundai and Kia are gunning for office mailroom jobs with the introduction of the DAL-e Delivery robot, that can not only distribute packages around a building autonomously, but can also do the coffee run.

This holiday season, shoppers in Helsinki are getting a little help to ease their gift-buying burden. When they place an online order from a select retailer, a wheeled HeRo robot will deliver their purchase to their home within an hour.

For the past year, Uber-backed Serve Robotics' wheeled robots have been delivering food to customers in the Los Angeles area. The firm has now announced that up to 2,000 of the bots are set to enter use with Uber Eats in other North American cities.

A special version of Goodyear's airless tire has been fitted to six-wheeled delivery robots at Ohio's Bowling Green State University campus in order to test factors such as tread wear, braking performance and vibration damping.

We've recently heard about several urban delivery robots which would move along city sidewalks on four wheels. The Mighty bot brings something new to the mix, however, with pivoting wheels that are mounted on articulated legs.

Kawasaki has shoehorned the supercharged 1,000cc engine from its wild H2R hyperbike into a heavy-lift autonomous cargo helicopter, and has now demonstrated a robotic system for loading and unloading it without exposing humans to those big blades.

Although some people are starting to venture back into air travel, the more that they can continue physical distancing, the better. A new robotic in-airport food delivery service has been introduced in order to help them do so.