Delivery robots from U.S.-based company Starship Technologies have come into their own during the lockdown as a way of delivering food to the residents and workers of Milton Keynes.

First Commercial Deployment in the UK

The autonomous robot delivery Service operated by Starship Technologies is the first commercial deployment in the UK, and since the beginning of March, has allowed Milton Keynes residents in the delivery area to get cooked food and small orders from supermarkets without having to leave the house.

Starship Technologies

Starship Technologies was founded back in 2014 by co-founders of Skype, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, who were joined 4 years later by Lex Bayer from Airbnb.

Test Deliveries Started in 2018

Starship first announced that it would be starting a robot food delivery service in Milton Keynes back in April 2018 where it had already partnered with Co-op in order to deliver groceries. At the time, as part of tests of the service, customers in the Milton Keynes area covered by the delivery services could pay a monthly subscription of £7.99 for an unlimited number of deliveries to an address of their choice, with the service operated via a phone app.

In January 2019 Starship Technologies launched a delivery service using the same kind of robots that are now being used in Milton Keynes UK in George Mason University campus in Virginia, USA.

The Robots

The self-driving, six-wheeled delivery robots, which have multiple cameras, ultrasound sensors, radar, and GPS, can identify pedestrians and other obstacles as they make their way along pavements to their target destination.

The robots can carry items within a 4-mile (6km) radius, move at pedestrian speed, weigh no more than 100 pounds, and have a mechanically locked cargo bay that can only be opened by the recipient with their smartphone app.

The robot’s progress on its delivery route can be monitored via the phone app so customers know when to expect their delivery.

Popular With Younger Customers

The company is reported as saying that its robot food deliveries in Milton Keynes have been particularly popular with younger customers and that the lockdown situation has added to what was already a huge surge in demand when the service was first trialled 2 years ago.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Starship Technologies have been building up this service for two years before launch, plus they have some months of commercial experience after running the service on a U.S. university campus. The coronavirus lockdown, however, has meant that more people have been prepared to try the service and have perhaps realised the benefits of speed, simplicity, and relatively low cost, as well as the reduced risk of being able to order from home.  Although it may be predominantly younger people at the moment, and the closure of other food outlets coupled with pressure on companies like Deliveroo have helped boost the demand for Starship’s service generally, robot deliveries do appear to be well placed to take advantage of an opportunity and need in the marketplace for certain quantities and could provide a useful delivery service small businesses in their areas of operation. Post lockdown, their popularity looks set to continue in population centres where road traffic congestion is a problem, and/or on UK university campuses perhaps. Automation and autonomous vehicles look set to play a part in the new ‘normal’, albeit a relatively small but novel and environmentally friendly one to start with.

Matthew Gould, chief executive of the National Health Service’s technology group NHSX has announced that a COVID-19 contact-tracing app for the UK could be ready “in the next couple of weeks”.

Bluetooth, Short-Range

Most countries in Europe that have chosen to use contact-tracing apps at some point have opted for a short-range Bluetooth “handshake” between mobile device options in order to identify a potential contact, although this method does not provide location data.

The new UK contact-tracing app will let people know if they have been in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. The app will use the same short-range, Bluetooth method as other similar apps and is currently reported to be the subject of a rapid testing programme. How the new app performs in the tests will determine how it is deployed, but it looks likely that the app will become an important tool as the UK starts to come out of lockdown.

Criticism

The announcement of UK’s app has already drawn criticism from some tech commentators who have expressed concerns that the app’s reliance on Bluetooth could negatively affect its accuracy, performance, and security.

Contact-Tracing and Self Quarantine Apps Being Used Elsewhere

Contact-tracing and self-quarantine apps are already being used in other countries. These include:

– Singapore’s ‘TraceTogether’ app. This app uses location data and Bluetooth and once on a user’s phone, the app records when that user goes near another person who has the TraceTogether app. This proximity data is stored on the user’s phone and can be requested for analysis with the user’s permission. The TraceTogether app is also used by the Singapore government to send out updates to citizens via WhatsApp twice a day containing information such as the number of cases, suspected locations of outbreaks, and advice for avoiding infection.

– South Korea’s “self-quarantine safety protection” app and “Corona 100m app”. The “self-quarantine safety protection” app from the country’s ‘Ministry of the Interior and Safety’ is used by central and local governments to send out real-time alerts via text message and the “Corona 100m app” which has been downloaded more than 1 million times and alerts users if they breach a 100-metre (328 ft) radius of the latest tracked whereabouts of a coronavirus patient.

France and Germany

France is opting for a centralised approach for its “StopCovid” app project i.e. storing the personal data of volunteers’ Bluetooth logs on a central server and not on individual devices. However, the app is currently the subject of arguments over civil liberties and privacy.

Germany has decided to use an app with a decentralised, Apple-Google-style approach i.e. logging contacts on individual devices rather than a central server. It is believed that this will make it easier for health authorities to contact users and give advice on the best course of action to them if they are found to be at risk.

Testing

Knowing whether someone has had COVID-19 can only really be established with testing. Tests in the UK, however, are only really getting underway now and this means that the app is only likely to be of real use further down the line when more people have been tested.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Businesses will now be thinking about the many ways that they can resume work safely as lockdown rules are relaxed, and many different tools and options may currently be under consideration e.g. changed work layouts and practices to accommodate social distancing, the possible use of thermographic cameras (temperature detection) and other tools such as apps. Just as technology has helped to enable remote, collaborative working, tech tools such as contact-tracing apps are, therefore, likely to be one of many things that can contribute to the country and businesses moving forward prior to the introduction of any effective vaccination programmes or treatments that can seriously limit the most severe symptoms of the COVID-19 virus. For the time being, social distancing is still the central focus of the strategy for all to keep as safe as possible.

Google has entered the video conferencing market fight with the likes of Zoom and Facebook Messenger as it announces that its ‘Google Meet’ premium video conferencing service will soon be free for everyone.

Google Meet

Google Meet is a video conferencing service that, until now, has only been paid-for as part of G Suite, Google’s collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organisations, and schools.

Google says that Meet will be now available free to anyone on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android (Meet apps can be found in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store). It is also possible to join Meet for free via Google Calendar.

100 Million+ Daily Meeting Participants

Google reports that, since January, Meet’s peak daily usage has grown by 30x and, as of April, Meet has been hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding approximately 3 million new users every day. Google also says that, as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million. A reported 6 million companies and organisations now use G Suite.

Limit

Even though Google will soon be offering Meet for free, meetings will be limited to 60 minutes for the free product after 30 September.

What’s Free

The services that businesses and organisations can expect to get for free with Meet include free access to Meet’s advanced features (for G Suite customers) including the ability to live stream for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, free additional Meet licenses for existing G Suite customers and free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers.

Not Immediately

Businesses and organisations may have to wait a week or two to get free access to Meet as it will be rolled out gradually from next week.

Compared To Zoom

Although using Meet may be a little more demanding than simply clicking on a link (as with Zoom), Google is keen to point out that Meet users have the benefits of advanced security.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The current global need for people to work remotely and yet collaborate effectively has led to fierce competition among tech companies looking to gain large numbers of new users e.g. Zoom, Facebook Messenger (now offering a desktop app), and Microsoft wanting to release a consumer edition of Teams.  Google is the next to throw its hat into the ring and is in a good position to do so with a free version of an already popular premium service. Tech companies realise that if they can lead the remote, collaborative working race now they can gain large numbers of new users, many of whom may become loyal and committed to their platforms and could be monetised later. For businesses and other users, there is now a great deal of choice between the options available for free remote and collaborative working platforms and services, and those which are easiest, add the most value, are most effective and secure and are most compatible with existing resources and practices are likely to be favoured going forward.

Technology is playing an important role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with adapted facial recognition cameras and super-computers now joining the battle to help beat the virus.

Adapted Facial Recognition

Facial recognition camera systems have been trialled and deployed in many different locations in the UK which famously include the 2016 and 2017 Notting Hill Carnivals, the Champions League final day June 2017 in Cardiff,  the Kings Cross Estate in 2019 and in a deliberately “overt” trial of live facial recognition technology by the Metropolitan Police in the centre of Romford, London, in January 2019.  Although it would be hard to deny that facial recognition technology (FRT) could prove to be a very valuable tool in the fight against crime, issues around its accuracy, bias and privacy have led to criticism in the UK from the Information Commissioner about some of the ways it has been used, while (in January) the European Commission was considering a ban on the use of facial recognition in public spaces for up to five years while new regulations for its use were put in place.

However, one way that some facial recognition systems have been adapted to help in the fight against COVID-19 include the incorporation of temperature screening.

Thermographic Temperature-Screening

In the early news reports of the initial spread of COVID-19 in China, news reports focused on how thermographic, temperature-screening cameras backed up by AI could be used to pick out people from crowds who displayed a key symptom, notably a raised temperature.

These systems are also likely to play a role in our post-lockdown, pre-vaccine world as one of many tools, systems, and procedures to improve safety as countries try to re-start their economies on the long road back.

In the UK – Facial Recognition Combined With ‘Fever Detection System’

In the UK, an AI-powered facial recognition system at Bristol Airport is reported to have been adapted to incorporate a ‘fever detection system’, developed by British technology company SCC. This means that the existing FRT system has been augmented with thermographic cameras that can quickly spot people, even in large moving groups (as would normally happen in airports) who have the kind of raised temperatures associated with COVID-19.

In Russia – Facial Recognition Combined With Digital Passes on Phones

It has also been reported that, as far back as March, officials in Moscow have been using the city’s network of tens of thousands of security cameras, which can offer instant, real-time facial recognition of citizens in combination with digital passes on mobile phones. It has been reported that the sheer number of cameras in Moscow, which can also be used to measure social distancing and detect crowds, coupled with the sophisticated FRT at the back-end is enough to ensure that those who are supposed to be in isolation can be detected even if they come outside their front door for a few seconds.  Moscow’s facial recognition system is also reported to be able to identify a person correctly, even if they are wearing a face mask.

Supercomputers

One of the great advantages of supercomputers is that they can carry out staggering numbers of calculations per second, thereby being able to solve complicated problems in a mere fraction of the time that it would take other computers to do the same thing.  Supercomputers are, therefore, now being used in the fight against coronavirus. For example:

– Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC) in the U.S. are using a Frontera supercomputer and a huge computer model of the coronavirus to help researchers design new drugs and vaccines.

– University College London (UCL) researchers, as part of a consortium of over a hundred researchers from across the US and Europe, are using some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers (including the biggest one in Europe and the most powerful one in the world) to study the COVID-19 virus and thereby help develop effective treatments and, hopefully, a vaccine.  The researchers have been using the Summit at Oak Ridge National Lab, USA (1st) and SuperMUC-NG at GCS@LRZ, Germany (9th)  supercomputers to quickly search through existing libraries of compounds that could be used to attach themselves to the surface of the novel coronavirus.

– In the U.S. the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium, a combined effort by private-public organisations, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, U.S. government departments and IBM are bringing together federal government, industry, and academics who are offering free computing time and resources on their supercomputers to help to understand and beat the coronavirus.

Looking Ahead

Facial recognition cameras used by police and government agencies have been the focus of some bad press and questions over a variety of issues, but the arrival of the pandemic has turned many things on their heads. The fact is that there are existing facial recognition camera systems which, when combined with other technologies, could help to stop the spread of a potentially deadly disease.

With vaccines normally taking years to develop, and with the pandemic being a serious, shared global threat, it makes sense that the world’s most powerful computing resources should be (and are being) deployed to speed up the process of understanding the virus and of quickly sorting through existing data and knowledge that could help.