Two robotic novelties are presented to the coworkers of Metro Group during its Innovation Day. For the first time in Germany the delivery robot Starship rolled over the terrain of the company for a test delivery, closely followed by the self propelled shopping trolley WiiGo.
When a robot delivers your fruit
Be it fruit, chocolate or other shopping items, soon robots will be able to deliver them to the customers’ doorstep. It may sound futuristic or like science fiction, but it happened on the Metro Group premises. The delivery robot, developed by Estonian Starship Technologies, went for his first test delivery, bringing chocolate to the children at the day care center. The delivery with a market-ready delivery robot was a first in Germany. The Starship robot with six wheels can carry 10 kilos of shopping and has an action radius of 5 kilometers; the robot can travel independently over the sidewalk and can circumvent all kinds of obstacles. Only the consumer can open the locked delivery box with a personal code. Starship Robotics, a company founded in 2014 by the Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, developed the little robot. In future the Starship robot could deliver all sorts of orders and deliveries from supermarkets, kiosks or other locations to the customers front door.
Followed by your shopping trolley
Pushing a shopping trolley around or carrying a shopping basket can be something of the past too. The WiiGo an self propelled shopping trolley can follow customers and wait at a convenient distance until the selected shopping has landed in the trolley. To make sure that the trolley keeps on following the right customers they are identified by facial recognition. The Portuguese Luis de Matos, founder and CEO of Inspiration Follow and his team want to make shopping easier with their invention. The next step for the WiiGo is to enable the trolley to get the product from the shelves on its own. The team of inventors are working on this vision now.
Source: Metro Group