The Just Eat App is Delivering Food with Robots!

The Just Eat app is a British takeout service that offers quick local food delivery. Similar to Grubhub and Seamless, the app provides menus and price listings for your favorite nearby joints, and lets you order what you want in a few easy clicks. It’s after you place your order that the magic happens. Once your food is prepared and ready to be delivered, the transport to your doorstep is handled by a robot.

Built by Starship Technologies (which in itself already sounds like something out of Star Trek), the robot looks like a cross between a cooler and a six-wheeled toy tank. The top is lifted and the food is stored safely in the carrying space. And, in case you’re wondering, it’s also built with the possibility for theft in mind; it’s designed to lock out random opportunists looking to score a free meal. Upon arrival, the robot follows basic etiquette, notifying the recipient with a text.

Read More: Instagram Has Released a New Shopping Feature

Sadly, the robots are only available and utilized in London at the moment — particularly in Greenwich, where they’re still in their test faze to see how the process pans out. So far, as you might expect, they’ve been met with much delight, awe, fascination, and growing enthusiasm for their imminent expansion. Of course the reception is not without a healthy dose of skepticism. Some fear the robots will be littering the streets and tripping up pedestrians as they make their way through the city. After all, a significant number of people walk while texting and are hardly checking their surroundings.

In any case, automated services are the wave of the future, and we’ll likely find ways to adapt rather than rule out the natural progress of technology. Conversely, it’d be interesting to see how robots function in the varied chaos across cities too. Between traffic lights and motorists, companies who utilize these services will have to take these variables into account and plan accordingly.

There’s plenty of time to adjust to and contemplate these exciting changes. That’s what a pilot program is for, after all. Within the next few years, Just Eat will begin expanding its automated delivery service to reach more communities across London. Delivery bots abound, part of the process is meeting challenges and perfecting the idea and the design. We can’t wait to see how these robots continue to evolve, and we’re sure that with time they’ll be brought to the states!