After an accident involving a pedestrian and a delivery robot, its manufacturer wanted to apologize to the victim. The compensation offered was borderline ridiculous.
As you sit quietly on a bench outside, a kind of cooler on wheels approaches you and stops right at your level. You stand up, lift the lid and take the bag inside. It contains the meal you ordered 30 minutes ago. This scene that would have been reminiscent of a sci-fi movie a few years ago is the daily reality of many people. The delivery by robots is not new. Amazon unveiled its “Scout” model in 2019 already.
In the United States, students at 30 universities are used to seeing Starship (nothing to do with the SpaceX ship), a 6-wheeled delivery robot like the one you can see in the illustration of this article. Their adoption has not been smooth, however, and a police report consulted by the 404 Media teams further tarnishes the company founded by the creators of the Skype software. The affair dates back to September 2023.
Woman knocked down by delivery robot for no apparent reason
On the campus of Arizona State University, an employee sees a delivery robot arrive while she is standing on foot near a parking entrance. She tells herself that she will let him pass and cross after. The machine passes her, but a few seconds later, she suddenly backtracks and charges at himwhich causes her to fall to the ground. While the woman is still there, the robot moves forward a little then comes back to hit it before finally leaving again.
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A campus police officer then arrives and notices that the person “seemed to be suffering” And “complained of lower back pain“She got away with a cut of about 10 cm on her left arm, but “had trouble getting going again” once the care was carried out. The employee’s testimony is then fully corroborated by a video of the incident.
Starship Offers Ridiculous Compensation After Robot Incident
A representative from Starship, the robot’s manufacturer, was contacted by the police. He then asked for the woman’s contact details.in order to be able to […] give him the insurance information [de la société] for his injuries and vouchers“. This is the only known compensation offered by the firm, given that there was no prosecution. The victim did not respond to a request for an interview, so it is unclear what happened after that.
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Starship claims to be “aware of a situation over a year ago where a robot came into contact with a pedestrian at extremely low speed after detecting an oncoming vehicle“.
Except that the police report is formal: “when the unmanned vehicle changed direction and hit [l’employée] for the second time, no vehicles were trying to enter the parking lot and nothing else seemed to be in front of him”. Faced with this inconsistency, the spokesperson responds: “not being able to comment in detail on individual cases“.
The company has already hit the headlines following the publication of some rather damning internal documents. For example, it asked universities to take promotional photos only with students who looked like they had “a healthy body mass index“. In the same way, No stairs should have been shownthe robot being unable to cross them.
Other incidents, without casualties, have also occurred: the machines have been seen several times leaving campus or rolling on construction sites. Some have also remained stuck at a red light for 15 minuteswhen there was no reason to wait so long.
Source: 404 Media