The Future Of Lunch Delivery Is A Giant Robot - And It's Not A Gimmick

What's that old line? 'Eat lunch or be lunch..."  JL


Lin Zhu reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Robots don’t get impatient, like human delivery people sometimes do, and they don’t ask for directions. They don’t make me wait in the lobby because they are running late, and they never ask me to walk outside to pick up my meal because they’re afraid to leave their other orders unattended.The robots use wireless connections to open lobby gates and elevator doors. They navigate to the right floor and then call the mobile phone number of the customers, who enter the last four digits of their phone number to unlock the box holding lunch. “I don’t think these are gimmicks. They’re trial runs of something that’s much more promising.”
The robots invaded in September. Two shiny metal cylinders, 3 feet tall, began riding the elevators in our upscale high-rise, ferrying lunches to desk-bound office workers.

It seemed like a gimmick. Beijing has hordes of scooter-riding delivery people to fetch your noodles and dumplings at the swipe of a smartphone app.
I gave the robots a try anyway, placing my salad order on a delivery app as usual, but specifying that I wanted a robot in the building to bring it to me.
The advantages soon became clear.
Robots are emotionally stable. They don’t get impatient or angry, like human delivery people sometimes do, and they don’t waste my time asking for directions. They don’t make me wait in the lobby because they are running late, and they never ask me to walk outside to pick up my meal because they’re afraid to leave their other orders unattended on their scooters.
Like a lot of people, I’ve seen robots in films and TV shows countless times. But until they came to our office building, I’d never dealt with a mobile, talking robot that performed a service and navigated its way around a series of obstacles to do it.
It turns out I’m not alone, and that’s what makes the rise of delivery robots in China something of a milestone, said Aaron D. Ames, a robotics expert at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Dr. Ames said he believes it’s meaningful that robots are starting to replace humans in doing some repetitive and difficult jobs, operating alongside humans in everyday life in limited but effective ways. “I don’t think these are gimmicks,” he said. “I think they’re trial runs of something that’s much more promising.”
The robots are made by Yunji Technology Co. of Beijing, which leases them for about $650 a month. Customers include hotels, hospitals and of course office buildings, many of which have banned lunch-toting delivery people from their elevators (which can get jammed during the noon rush). Yunji says its aim is to bridge the gap between delivery destination and the transfer to a consumer, contending that it’s cheaper to hire a robot than a human to do such delivery work.
The Raffles City office-retail complex in Beijing, where The Wall Street Journal has a bureau, rented two robots, naming them Xiao Lai and Xiao Fu (“Little Lai” and “Little Fu”).
The robots use wireless connections to open lobby gates and elevator doors. Looking like tall Roomba vacuum robots, they navigate to the right floor and then call the mobile phone number of the customers, who enter the last four digits of their phone number to unlock the box holding lunch.
In true science-fiction fashion, the robots declare their presence upon entering an elevator.
“Could everyone move aside and leave the center spot for me, please?” Xiao Lai asked in a child-like Mandarin voice one day recently. The human passengers obediently squeezed into corners.
“Where are you going?” one woman asked. Then to the group: “Should we help it press the button since it has no arms?”
The robot spoke as if it had ears. “Everyone, watch me perform a magic trick! Elevator, please stop on floor 20,” it said, although the floor selection is made wirelessly, not by voice command.
Wu Danyang, 26 years old, was waiting to greet it. “It’s the first time that I interacted with a robot,” said Ms. Wu, who works for an investment-management company. She retrieved her order, and then patted Xiao Lai on the head and waved goodbye as it moved slowly back to the elevator.
The robots haven’t been universally welcomed, however.
“It just looks very clumsy moving among fast-walking people at lunch hour,” Liu Zefan, a 29-year-old who works for a home-decoration firm as a marketer, said of Xiao Lai. “And it never stops talking! I almost wanted to slap it in the face to make it shut up. ”
And neither are the robots perfect. Xiao Fu broke down earlier this week, and lunches piled up on the lobby counter as Xiao Lai struggled to keep pace.