UNM unveils new robotic food delivery service

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – It’s UNM’s newest way to get food from the campus’ kitchens to student stomachs. If you’ve been on University of New Mexico’s (UNM) campus this school year, you may have seen small robots driving around. No, they’re not a student school project, but a neat, new way the university is delivering food to customers.

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“We hope that they really enjoy this service,” said Amanda Gerard, Institutional Support Manager for UNM. “We’re really excited to continually expand and offer services that our students want to see and are asking about.”

In partnership with Grubhub and Aramark, students, faculty or even visitors can have a four wheeled robot deliver their food through the Grubhub app.

“It has been up and running since the first day of school, we’ve just been working through some challenges but we’re getting better and better every day,” Gerard explained.

Currently, the fleet is made up of 10 multi-thousand-dollar robots. After placing an order, the robot goes to the pickup location, where a staff member will place the food bag inside. The robot then locks up, and makes the trek across campus, parking itself near a building entrance for the customer to pick up the food. The customer unlocks the bot with their phone and grabs their meal.

“Once that’s done, the robot then relocks and drives on its way to the next destination,” said Travis Price, spokesperson for Grubhub.

When it comes to safety and security of the robot and food, officials say the locking mechanism will ensure people’s orders aren’t stolen, and that a right-of-way feature in the robot’s software will give pedestrians priority on the sidewalk, or path that it’s on. However, if something were to happen the order, like it gets stolen or damaged, Grubhub officials say they’ll be responsible for reimbursing the customers.

“We’ve had, across the program, very few incidents of vandalism, or any sort of accident,” Price added.

Officials say if the program does well, they hope to extend it to other UNM campuses in the metro as well. “We’ll evaluate, make sure that it’s running really well, and consult our partners of when and if we can expand to, let’s say north campus,” Gerard said.

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