It's been about 15 minutes since Cayden Wilford pulled out his smartphone and opened a new app.
He clicked around until he found a suitable breakfast order, a cinnamon bagel with strawberry schmear.
And now he’s at the front door of his dorm, as a six-wheeled robot arrives. He can't help but show his excitement.
“What’s up little buddy? How’s it going?" he says. To his surprise, the robot responds, “Hello, here’s your delivery."
The mechanical engineering major is impressed. “That’s so cool."
He lifts the robot’s lid, pulls out his food and closes the hatch. “Thanks for the bagel, buddy. We love you!”
For Wilford, the two dollar delivery charge was worth every penny to see the robot come to his door.
“Anything like this, robots, I hopefully someday will be making them, which will be even cooler.”
Right now, the robots are a novelty. But NAU officials hope they catch on, solving an on-campus food delivery problem they’ve had for years.
Ben Hartley, the Director of Campus Dining at NAU, says plenty of ideas have been tossed around in the past.
“Is it bicycles? Is it people walking? Is it cars? Each of them has their own challenges.”
He says NAU students are on the go all the time, so the robots speak to their busy schedules.
“Students have about 20 minutes typically that they need to get somewhere, get in a line, get food, eat it and then get back to another class. So the ability to take one of those variables out of that is very appealing.”
The school partnered with Starship Technologies, a tech company started by two of the co-founders of Skype.
NAU is their second college campus. Deliveries at George Mason University in Virginia started in January. They also deliver around a few corporate campuses, and a couple neighborhoods in Europe.
“We've delivered over 30,000 deliveries around the world,” says Ryan Touhy, who’s starting up the N-A-U operation for Starship.
“What we do when we come into environment is first we map it. So we create our own proprietary 3D map of the potential routes. We've tested steep inclines, upwards, downwards, so we're well prepared for this campus. As a matter of fact, we think this campus is a near ideal place for our technology.”
And on the occasion they struggle with the terrain, Touhy says people tend to help out.
“There were a few times where the robot look like it was struggling. These students would go and nudge the robot along and give it a push.”
And, as one group of students found out when they blocked the path of the recently-emptied robot that delivered Cayden Wilford's bagel, the drones can be exceedingly polite.
“Excuse me, would you please let me pass?” The robot says, bringing laughs to the group. “Thank you, have a nice day.”
