An Edinburgh University student-led startup is conducting trials of a novel robot-based food delivery service. The initiative, named Pixconvey, aims to facilitate food orders from the university’s Kings Buildings café to students across the campus, supported by Edinburgh Innovations, the university’s commercial arm.
The service utilises autonomous delivery robots, dubbed Pixie and Pixa, developed by Ebtehal Alotaibi, a doctoral student specialising in AI and robotics at the university’s School of Informatics. These robots, which evolved from models initially created at the university’s Bayes Centre, a hub for AI and data science research, are designed to independently navigate the campus.
Students can place orders through a combination of the Upay payment system and a dedicated Pixconvey app, selecting their desired delivery location and time slot. Café staff, upon preparing the order, load it onto a robot and dispatch it via a control dashboard. The robot then autonomously proceeds to the delivery location, where, upon arrival, the staff is notified to remotely unlock the robot’s storage compartment for the student to retrieve their order. After delivery, the robot autonomously returns to the café.
Robots like Pixie and Pixa work by leveraging computer vision, AI, and autonomous navigation to perform food deliveries. Computer vision allows these robots to interpret their surroundings and navigate obstacles, while AI algorithms enable real-time decision-making and route optimisation. Autonomous navigation systems, combining GPS and lidar, guide the robots to their destinations without human guidance.
The project, if successful, aims to offer a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution to food delivery, as explained by Alotaibi. She highlights the potential for Pixconvey to reduce delivery costs, associated with labour and vehicle use, and address hygiene concerns, with the robots employing LED rays for sanitising food containers. Furthermore, Alotaibi envisions expanding this service throughout Edinburgh, motivated by a personal tragedy that fuelled her research into autonomous vehicles — the loss of her aunt in a car accident due to driver error, underscoring the safety potential of driverless technology.
The University of Edinburgh, through its School of Informatics and the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, a collaboration with Heriot-Watt University, has had a number of breakthroughs in the development of innovative humanoid robots designed for complex interactions and environments. Alongside leading-edge autonomous systems that navigate and understand their surroundings with minimal human intervention, like the takeaway robot mentioned above, one standout project, the Valkyrie robot, developed in partnership with NASA, is aimed at future Mars missions. Additionally, the university has been instrumental in the Robotic Assisted Living Testbed, aimed at enhancing healthcare delivery through robotics, demonstrating its commitment to applying robotics in solving real-world problems.
