Send In the Delivery Robots
Growing up, I always wanted to find a way to give back to Canada’s small-business community. My dad came here from Uganda as a refugee in the ’70s and, if not for the owner of a small Ottawa department store who gave him a job, he might never have gone on to post-secondary studies. After earning my own degree in environmental science from the University of Ottawa in 2008, I worked in STEM and later in digital marketing, with the goal of connecting businesses with sustainable technologies to help them grow.
Before the pandemic, I consulted on the launches of Uber Eats and DoorDash in Ottawa. I realized that much smaller businesses—not just restaurants—would need lower-cost delivery options for customers if they were going to survive rising rents and dwindling foot traffic. In 2023, I joined Real Life Robotics, a Waterloo-based startup with a brilliant solution: couriering orders via a fleet of AI-powered robots.
Automated delivery isn’t a cute gimmick. It can have a tangible economic impact at a time when small-business owners sorely need it. Since COVID, they have been routinely outcompeted by global brands like Amazon, whose massive delivery networks can provide same- or next-day shipping for cheap. Right now, there’s a huge desire to buy Canadian, but it’s hard for customers to act on it when shopping local can be more time-consuming and, sometimes, more expensive than simply ordering online from a multinational corporation. Real Life Robotics’s model helps entrepreneurs—like community hardware-store owners, specialty grocers and florists—into the ring by giving them access to the robots and remote support they need to provide local customers with an affordable and environmentally friendly delivery option.
Last winter, we launched Canada’s first municipally sanctioned robot delivery pilot in Markham, Ontario. The goal: to prove that we could safely implement the technology on Canada’s streets. Then, this spring, we kicked off a 90-day commercial robot food-delivery operation in partnership with Skip (also in Markham). Our robots look like little coolers on wheels. They’re guided by an onboard AI-navigation system that helps them dodge obstacles on sidewalks as they carry cargo from A to B. A suite of sensors and cameras allow them to navigate crosswalks, curbs and busy pedestrian areas. Once they reach their destination, customers unlock the robot’s storage compartment with a QR code and retrieve their food. Our current robots can drive around for a full day and up to two kilometres from stores before their batteries need a recharge.
Feeding humans is only one of the robots’ potential uses. Last August, we ran another pilot with the Toronto Zoo. Every day, our machines carried a portion of the animals’ daily meals from the zoo’s central kitchen to their enclosures, where it was doled out by their human handlers. In the near future, robots could potentially be used to deliver medications from pharmacies—an accessible solution for Canadians with low mobility. They might even show up on golf courses as self-driving drink carts, delivering cold ones to thirsty players on the green and filling the seasonal staffing needs of course operators. We’re planning to test this idea soon at city-owned courses in Kitchener, Ontario; we’ll see how well the robots dodge sand traps.
Automated delivery could also be useful for Canada Post, which is struggling to compete with UPS and FedEx. Human carriers could drive letters and parcels from shipment centres to their appropriate neighborhoods, then set robots loose to tackle the last-mile drop-off. Robots are also well-suited to tourist towns, like Blue Mountains in Ontario, whose year-round population is too low to justify full-time delivery workers. Robots could sub in for couriers during the high season.
It seems like a no-brainer to use machines for the dull or dangerous jobs that people don’t enjoy doing, but the goal isn’t to fully replace human workers. Delivery isn’t a one-size-fits-all business; these fleets are just another tool to move goods around cities. Robotic delivery is best suited to smaller neighbourhoods and urban settings with high walkability scores. In these spaces, the bots could offset some of the congestion added by delivery vehicles, which often double-park during drop-offs. At three feet tall, our robots keep a low profile. In other words, Canadians won’t have to worry about sharing their sidewalks with RoboCop—more like R2-D2.
Delivery robots have a role to play in making Canada’s cities smarter and greener too. They don’t produce emissions or burn fossil fuels, making them more eco-friendly than gas-powered vehicles. (During our Toronto Zoo pilot, we found that the robots were 98 per cent more efficient on emissions than a fossil fuel–burning alternative.) Our fleet of machines are also able to assess environmental conditions while they’re out on the job. They can be outfitted with devices that monitor air quality, temperature and tree cover. They can even snap photos of potholes that need fixing. All that data collection won’t put pedestrians’ privacy at risk, either: the AI software we use can easily scrub identifying features, like faces and licence plates.
For all their benefits, these kinds of robots have so far struggled to get off the ground in Canada because municipal politicians are worried about flooding busy city sidewalks with undertested technology. That’s why places like Toronto banned them during COVID. But automated delivery has already been widely adopted around the world. It’s now entirely commonplace in South Korea. The Estonian company Starship recently completed eight million deliveries worldwide and, this year, Serve Robotics, a Californian company, plans to launch 2,000 new robots across the U.S. with Uber Eats. The global market for robotic delivery is expected to surpass US$4 billion by 2032.
In Canada, Real Life Robotics has been consulting with forward-thinking municipalities across Ontario (like Markham) to make sure we roll out our little couriers responsibly. Our bot model—which is manufactured by the Colombian company Robot.com—has already successfully delivered food items on more than 20 college campuses across the U.S., so we know the hardware is road-ready. Plus, if an issue occurs during one of our test runs, we can make real-time software tweaks so it doesn’t happen again—one upside of AI.
Autonomous delivery technology is improving by leaps and bounds every day, so it won’t be long until these robots find a home here; Real Life’s goal is to have 500 of them in circulation within the next two years. At the start of the Markham pilot, our robots were accompanied by humans, who walked alongside as they mapped the terrain, learned how to detect crossing signals in the rain and picked up tricks for responding to unpredictable foot traffic. The machines will soon take to the streets all by themselves, but they’ll still be monitored remotely by our operators. At the end of the day, it’s still a human’s world—robots just work in it.
Sharif Virani is the head of growth at Real Life Robotics, based in Waterloo, Ontario.
