Whether it’s in a suburban neighborhood or a university campus, autonomous delivery robots are starting to crop up more frequently.

FedEx on Wednesday officially announced its own delivery robot today. It’s called the SameDay Bot, and it’s designed to make the last mile of a delivery a bit easier. The delivery robot has a max speed of 10 mph, and it’s batter powered to keep trucking along out there in the wild. Utilizing a combination of LIDAR sensors, the SameDay Bot can navigate around traffic and pedestrians.

FedEx plans on deploying the SameDay bot in a limited trial of sorts. It will send out the delivery robots from its headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, as long as it gets approval from the local government to do so. If everything goes according to plan, FedEx plans on offering the same-day delivery robot to other companies as well to handle their deliveries.

Those companies include AutoZone, Target, Pizza Hut, Lowe’s, Walmart, Walgreens, and others. According to FedEx’s announcement, some 60 percent of customers to these retailers live within three miles of a store. That would be just about perfect for the SameDay Bot to handle deliveries.

You can check out a video of the SameDay Bot below:

Amazon is already in this game, as it debuted its own autonomous delivery robot, the Amazon Scout, earlier this year. That is being tested in the state of Washington now, but Amazon obviously plans on expanding availability at some point in the future. And on the George Mason University campus, Starship Technologies is delivering food and snacks to students with its own autonomous robot.

What do you think of this delivery type?

[via FedEx]








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