'Delivery robots will happen': Skype co-founder on fast-growing venture Starship (www.theguardian.com)

Ahti Heinla, Skype co‑founder and CEO of Starship Technologies, says autonomous sidewalk delivery is poised to go mainstream. Starship has completed roughly 8 million deliveries with a lean team of about 200 employees and runs about 1 million deliveries a year in Finland. Its robots—built from lessons in a NASA Mars‑rover contest—use radars, cameras and ultrasound sensors and continuously learn from experience; they have operated unsupervised in public since 2017. Heinla claims per‑robot hardware costs are several thousand euros (under €10,000) and that deliveries are already cheaper than human couriers in many settings. Starship works with partners including Bolt, Co‑op and Grubhub and has raised just over €200M in funding. The significance for AI/ML and robotics is practical and immediate: scalable perception, navigation and fleet learning systems are proving viable in messy urban environments, enabling last‑mile economics that could extend delivery to small towns currently uneconomical for human drivers. Key hurdles are not just tech but regulation—Starship points to Finland’s national rules enabling scale versus fragmented UK local approvals—and competition from ground and aerial rivals (Serve, Nuro, Noon, Manna, Amazon/Wing) and autonomous‑car players. If costs and policy converge, these systems could reshape local logistics, shift labor toward higher‑skill roles, and create large autonomous fleets whose fleet‑level learning and routing optimizations become central ML problems.