Amazon, which currently charges a $99 annual fee for 2-day deliveries under its “Prime” service, will eventually offer 2-tier pricing for delivery services. One will be a “Gold Prime” membership costing $199 to $249 a year that covers next-day deliveries, the other a platinum membership for $399 a year that includes same-day deliveries.

2019-08-20: Starship Technologies

The company has made over 100K commercial deliveries. The total funding has reached $85M. Parcels, groceries and food are directly delivered from stores, at the time that the customer requests via a mobile app. Once ordered the robots’ entire journey and location can be monitored on a smartphone. Starship delivery bots use machine learning to detect objects and do not use expensive LIDAR. Starship robots mostly drive on sidewalks and cross streets when they need to. This poses a different set of challenges compared to self-driving cars. Traffic on car roads is more structured and predictable.

2021-01-27: 1m now:

Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the sidewalk. In addition to sidewalks, the robots are also doing 50K street crossings per day.

This might seem mundane, but both sidewalks and bike lanes are a huge opportunity. Even Amazon realized this, and is using both for last km delivery.

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