Delivering the future to you
<p>The Starship Technologies delivery robot drives down a sidewalk on 8th Street on Friday in Coeur d'Alene. The six-wheeled, 35-pound autonomous robot carries up to 20 pounds of cargo and uses multiple cameras and sensors to navigate urban areas to deliver goods to customers.</p>
<p>The Starship Technologies delivery robot is parked with its cargo container open on Friday. The six-wheeled, 35-pound autonomous robot carries up to 20 pounds of cargo and uses multiple cameras and sensors to navigate urban areas to deliver goods to customers.</p>
<p>Allen Martinson, chief operating officer of Starship Technologies, is photographed during an interview on Friday at the Think Big Festival in Coeur d'Alene.</p>
COEUR d’ALENE — What has six wheels, multiple cameras, a top speed of 4 miles an hour and navigation 100 times more accurate than GPS? It’s Starship Technologies’ delivery robot — the delivery system of the future.
"It’s a new class of devices," Starship COO Allan Martinson said during a demonstration in downtown Coeur d'Alene on Friday afternoon. "We have trucks, we have cars, we have vans, we have segways, so this is something new."
Martinson explained the small robot can deliver anything that can fit within its cargo bay, which holds about three grocery bags, and can drive almost completely autonomously but can be helped by a human operator.
"It’s good for everybody. It’s really convenient. You could get your packages, your food, your groceries, anything in 30 minutes," he said. "We'd like to bring the cost of delivery down to $1. $1, on-demand, 30 minutes. You couldn't get anything like that on the market today."
Starship's delivery robot is already being utilized in Europe and has a little way to go before it can be launched in the United States, but it has been tested in several U.S. cities.
Coeur d'Alene is the 45th city where the bot has been tested, but it's the first city to welcome the presence of robots.
"This town is the first one on Earth, as far as we know, which already legalized robots on the streets in 2014," Martinson said. "It’s written in the city code. Robots are welcome in parks and on sidewalks and on city property.
"The city independently came to this idea — that’s why we must be here. There’s no way we wouldn’t come visit."
Starship Technologies is headquartered in London and Estonia, but Martinson and six others from the company are in town to celebrate innovation in robotics at the annual Think Big Festival, which opened Friday and continues today.
Martinson said in the last eight months, Starship has been invited to 250 different conferences and attended about 60, "but this one, I like this one the most."
"It's a small-town feeling, extremely friendly," he said. "At other conferences, people are business-minded, they’re buying or selling something, but here it’s about ideas, it’s about thinking big, and that really makes it wonderful."
The Think Big Festival is a conglomeration of panels, presentations and demonstrations where forward-thinking individuals and some of the biggest names in technology unite. This year's speakers include local and international tech leaders, from xCraft to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Katalyst, Inc. It also includes experiences with drones, self-driving race cars and much more.
"For the public, it’s really exciting because they get to see things that they would never normally try," said Nathan Frisk, content manager for Innovation Collective, which coordinates the event. "They get to try the HoloLens and virtual reality and see companies like Starship with delivery robots. They had the city council earlier this week and I remember one of the guys asking, ‘Is this something that I’m really going to see in my lifetime?’ and the response was, 'It’s not a prototype, it’s happening.'"
Think Big continues today at North Idaho College, 1000 W. Garden Ave. in Coeur d'Alene. Tickets are $125 and available on site or at www.thinkbigfestival.com/2016.