GrubHub’s push into college campuses includes Russian-made delivery bots

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

This fall, Russian self-driving delivery bots will be invading college campuses. If that sounds like a storyline straight out of science fiction, well, it’s a science fact thanks to a multi-year partnership between GrubHub and Russian tech giant Yandex.

The partnership aims to put robotic lunchboxes on over 250 campuses across the US, starting with dozens this fall. The robots will be operated by Yandex, Russia’s alternative to Google, and they’ll be in charge of the delivery process as well. GrubHub is providing the ordering platform, giving the robots a large selection of restaurants to deliver from.

GrubHub is happy about the potential cost savings for using autonomous robots to deliver, which is pretty on-brand for a company that hijacked restaurant details to charge commission fees and said it would suspend commission fees early on in the pandemic, only to revise their offer to say those fees would still need to be paid back eventually.

Then again, using autonomous delivery robots on campuses will slow down any potential COVID-19 spread, so maybe we can give them kudos for one thing, even if their business model is fairly reprehensible.

The delivery robots drive at three to five miles an hour and are adapted to deal with the car-free areas of college campuses, like pavements, crosswalks, and pedestrian-only areas. The GrubHub app fully tracks their progress and lets the customer know when it’s outside, so they can go and pick up their food from the robot’s hatch.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Hyundai just bought Boston Dynamics so it can start replacing us with robots
• Amazon is apparently firing its delivery drivers based on an algorithm
• Kroger is getting in on the drone delivery game and will be sending people medicine and s’mores
• Uber says it might get into the weed delivery game

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.