In the future, your food or package could be delivered by a coordinated fleet of self-driving vehicles.

That’s the vision of Dispatch, an autonomous delivery startup, that’s starting out with a pilot program delivering packages on college campuses. The startup recently raised a $2 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures.

The company was started by three co-founders with backgrounds in artificial intelligence. Before building the prototype, Uriah Baalke, one of the co-founders, said his team did a “sanity check,” asking on-demand startups and small stores if this is a service they would use, and received a positive response.

From there, the team joined an accelerator in China, and started work on the first prototype, which, at an early stage, looked like “a wheelchair with a cooler on it,” said investor Charles Hudson. But Hudson said the team quickly made progress, while also being conscious of cost.

Now, the four-wheeled autonomous vehicle, nicknamed “Carry,” is being piloted on the campuses of Menlo College and California State University—Monterey Bay. The vehicle self-navigates the sidewalks at a pedestrian pace and uses cameras and lidar, a technology that measures distance using pulses of light, to avoid obstacles. The robot absorbs data and gets smarter with each trip.

“What we’re doing is we’re using modern AI techniques to help the robot understand the world around it and react accordingly,” Baalke said.

A student at Menlo College picks up a package. Courtesy of Dispatch

There are currently two vehicles in action and they each have four locking-compartments to store the mail or package to be delivered. On campus, the student receives mobile notifications while the vehicle is en route and then uses a code to unlock the compartment.

College campuses were an ideal place to test it out, he said, because they’re enclosed areas but have a dynamic environment with pedestrians, bicycles and skateboards. But the idea is to eventually expand to city streets or beyond and add on different kinds of deliveries.

Depending on the delivery and the environment, the team may have to develop different vehicles, or partner with existing retailers and on-demand startups. Baalke said he expects automated delivery to evolve into a team of vehicles, where, for example, a self-driving car could team up with a smaller automated delivery vehicle.

“In the future you can imagine that an autonomous delivery infrastructure won’t just be one thing,” Baalke said.

Building out this fleet goes beyond the machinery, Hudson said, as it involves a larger consideration of how to introduce robots into society.

“To me, the big question is what’s the human machine interface and what are the policy and practical concerns of having thousands of these delivery robots on our roads and our campuses,” Hudson said.

In the short-term, Hudson said he expects more companies to start by experimenting with college campuses and corporate environments.

There are already a few examples, such as ride-hailing startup Uber and separately Google Inc. GOOG, -2.37% working on self-driving cars and Amazon Inc. AMZN, -1.78% testing drone delivery.

Baalke won’t go so far as to say automated vehicles will replace humans at on-demand startups, an idea that has been floated with Uber’s reported quest to build self-driving cars. But he said he expects the trend to accelerate.

“Once you imagine this it’s hard to really imagine a future without it,” Baalke said.