Deliveroo is putting delivery robots on the pavements of five UK towns
Deliveroo has partnered with the American firm Coco Robotics to run four-wheeled pavement robots in five UK locations, starting in Canary Wharf this month, and says most orders will still go to human riders. Milton Keynes, one of the five, has had robot deliveries since April 2018 through Starship, a company founded in Tallinn and […] This story continues at The Next Web
Deliveroo has partnered with the American firm Coco Robotics to run four-wheeled pavement robots in five UK locations, starting in Canary Wharf this month, and says most orders will still go to human riders. Milton Keynes, one of the five, has had robot deliveries since April 2018 through Starship, a company founded in Tallinn and now headquartered in San Francisco.
Deliveroo is putting delivery robots on British pavements. The first arrive in Canary Wharf this month, with four more towns to follow. One of those towns has had them since 2018.
The company has partnered with Coco Robotics, whose electric four-wheeled machines travel at walking pace using cameras, sensors and AI, as TechRadar reported . Milton Keynes, Leeds, Stockton on Tees and Nottingham follow in the coming weeks and months.
The scheme is small at first. Only a handful of merchants are taking part, among them Patty and Bun, Signorelli and Beam in Wood Wharf.
Deliveroo says the majority of orders will still go to its riders. It has not said what share the robots will take, or by when.
Britain has been letting autonomy in slowly. Uber and Wayve put London’s first robotaxis on the road in September with a safety driver in every car, because Transport for London licensed them as private hire vehicles rather than automated ones.
The reassurance about riders is a familiar one, and it has been given before by companies further down the same road.
JD.com’s founder said in June that robots would replace his couriers , sooner or later, while promising not to sack anyone. He has 700,000 of them.
Riders elsewhere have been gaining ground rather than losing it.
China ordered its delivery apps in April to stop sending orders to exhausted drivers , and made the dispatch algorithm subject to union bargaining. More than 200 million workers are covered.
DoorDash has owned it since October 2025 and already runs Coco robots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Washington. Coco’s only European city so far is Helsinki. Its machines also feed pavement hazard data to BlindSquare, a Finnish navigation app for blind and partially sighted people.
Milton Keynes, meanwhile, has had pavement robots for eight years, which makes it an odd choice of frontier.
Starship has run them there since April 2018, with Co-op and Tesco, and says it has made nine million deliveries from 270 locations across seven countries. It was founded in Tallinn by two of Skype’s co-founders, and moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 2018.
