If you sometimes order your groceries via Deliveroo, you will soon no longer have a bicycle courier (or moped driver) at your door, but Natacha or Nono. These are the two autonomous delivery robots currently being tested by Carrefour in the Corporate Village in Zaventem. The robots can carry up to 15 kilograms and reach a top speed of 7 km/h. Carrefour promises delivery within 15 minutes if you place an order from the local Carrefour supermarket within the business park.
Soon in the big cities?
With this, Carrefour has a European first in terms of autonomous delivery of groceries. Colruyt is also working on a test project with autonomous delivery robots, which are already driving on public roads in Londerzeel, but still need to be controlled remotely by a human driver. In time, Carrefour also wants to take to the public road with its robots from the Turkish company Delivers.AI, starting in the major cities such as Brussels, Antwerp, Liège or Ghent, but it will first have to obtain special permission.
Once Carrefour has broken through in the big cities, the supermarket chain also sees potential in offering the autonomous delivery service in smaller cities and municipalities, which are usually not served by these delivery services because the market is too small to deploy hubs and human couriers . But for now, the terrain of the Carrefour bots is limited to Corporate Village in Zaventem, where 9,000 employees work on an area of 60 hectares. The ideal place to serve enough people in a controlled environment. Will you have to start calling a robot soon if it can’t find your address?
