The autonomous delivery droid manufacturer Starship Technologies has announced plans to begin an autonomous food delivery service at the University of Nevada-Reno (UNR) campus in partnership with the contract foodservice management company Chartwells Higher Education. This marks the company's first university deployment in Nevada. 

The company plans to launch a fleet of approximately 20–40 droids by next month to deliver food orders to students and staff from available Nevada Dining restaurant locations – the campus-wide dining services provider. 

Starship Technologies operates a delivery droid predominantly designed to traverse pedestrian sidewalks at a speed of roughly 4 mph, carrying up to  20 lbs. The droids are equipped with cameras, GPS, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and other mapping techniques for autonomous navigation. In May 2021, its robots reported completing 1.5 million autonomous deliveries, recording 4x growth since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Analyst QuickTake: Tapping university campuses for deliveries has been a key strategy for Starship with UNR being the 16th such site of operations. Its competitors, Kiwibot and Yandex have identical strategies of targeting campuses for their services. In fact, the news comes just two weeks after Yandex announced a similar, but much larger, partnership with food delivery company Grubhub to deploy its delivery droids in 250 campuses across the US.