The COVID-19 outbreak is accelerating the adoption of autonomous sidewalk delivery robots in the US, as startups Starship and Kiwibot scramble to meet demand
“We saw that business double overnight,” startup says of UK grocery deliveries. — On the morning of March 30 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Starship has been building toward this for years: it began testing six-wheeled delivery robots in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland in 2016, then in 2018 launched services aimed at corporate and academic campuses with roughly a thousand robots rolling out that year. The pandemic turned that slow campus build-out into a demand shock — the company says its UK grocery business doubled overnight once lockdowns hit.
First-order effects
- Starship and Kiwibot must scale robot production and operations immediately to meet surging US contactless-delivery demand, shifting their focus from campus pilots to essential grocery and food runs.
- Starship's Milton Keynes fleet became critical lockdown infrastructure, delivering groceries to residents of the 270K-person city during stay-at-home orders.
Second-order effects
- Grocers and restaurants gain a no-contact last-mile channel without hiring couriers, making robot delivery a viable add-on to online ordering at exactly the moment e-commerce demand spikes.
- Rival sidewalk-robot operators face pressure to match the demonstrated lockdown reliability, accelerating fleet expansion across the sector rather than cautious pilots.
Third-order effects
- If post-pandemic habits keep consumers ordering via robots, US college campuses — described as an ideal proving ground with pedestrian-friendly layouts and eager students — become the template for scaling to dense urban neighborhoods, moving sidewalk delivery from novelty to standard last-mile option.
The trend: The pandemic is compressing years of gradual sidewalk-robot adoption into months, converting campus experiments into essential urban delivery infrastructure.