Robovan Starship Technologies and Mercedes-Benz Vans

It’s robots to go. A van pulls up in a village street and a ramp extends to the pavement from a side door. A swarm of wheeled robots trundle down the ramp and head off down local streets on missions of their own. Their cargo delivered, they head back up the ramp and the van drives off.

This is the vision behind a new collaboration between delivery robot start-up Starship Technologies based in Tallinn, Estonia, and German car maker Mercedes-Benz.


Amazon is testing flying drones to deliver packages, but the e-commerce giant faces a raft of regulatory hurdles before its bots take off. In the meantime, ground-based delivery robots are ready to go.

The main problem with delivery bots is battery life. If robots are to be used to deliver packages across a whole country, rather than just in cities, they need a helping hand. Most existing robots can only manage trips of 2 to 3 kilometres.

Beetlebot, what what have you got?

This is where Mercedes comes in. It announced today that it is developing a variant of its workhorse van, the Sprinter. The vans will act as motherships for fleets of up to eight delivery bots, says Volker Mornhinweg at Mercedes.

Starship’s six-wheeled robots can carry 10 kilograms worth of parcels, groceries and takeaway food to homes at precise times of a customer’s choosing. On arrival, the customer unlocks the beetle-like robot’s shiny carapace via an app on their phone and takes out their goods. In the UK, Starship is piloting its robot services in Greenwich with takeaway food service Just Eat.

Robovan Starship Technologies and Mercedes-Benz Vans

One concern is that the robots will be vandalised or have their contents stolen. To guard against that, Starship has given its robots video cameras that should catch anyone trying to damage them, says Starship spokesperson Henry Harris-Burland. But in all their tests so far, across 47 countries, none of their robots have seen any trouble, he says.

To see the kind of reaction the robots get from the public, I decided to accompany one on its rounds. Trundling along at walking pace, the robot stopped whenever its ultrasound and visual sensors detected someone passing in front of it. The robots are semi-autonomous – this one was being controlled remotely from Estonia via 4G wireless. But Starship has plans to make them fully autonomous. Eventually, the mothership vans could be driverless too and the delivery bots loaded by other robots in a warehouse – a robot driving robots filled by robots.

It’s not yet the quickest courier service around, however. In Greenwich, the robot was surrounded by curious passers-by and it took many minutes to travel just 100 metres.

“What does it do?” one person asks. “Controlled from Estonia?” says another. “That’s nuts!” Children greeted the whirring droid like a friend, giving it a cheery “Hello!”