A start-up created by a student from the University of Edinburgh is trialling a robot-based autonomous food-delivery service.
Pixconvey will test the technology by delivering food orders from the university’s Kings Buildings café to students across the campus. Edinburgh Innovations, the university’s commercialisation service, also supports the project.
Known as Pixie and Pixa, the self-driving robots were created by student Ebtehal Alotaibi, an AI and robotics PhD student at Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. The robots were adopted from models created by the Bayes Centre – a specialist AI and data-science facility at the university.
Using an app bringing together popular payments platform Upay with a dedicated Pixconvey app, students will be able to order food from the café to be delivered to a specific location during a timeslot of their choosing. When the order is ready, staff at the eatery will load it onto one of the robots, and use a control dashboard to dispatch the robot, which will then “autonomously navigate” to the specified delivery address.
