Experiences With a Last Meter Delivery Robot

ABSTRACT The steady growth of e‐commerce is a consolidated trend continuously increasing the number of parcels delivered worldwide. Conventionally, in logistics, last mile delivery has been the area of study covering the last step of a parcel delivery process: from the nearest distribution center to the customer. However, in a society tending to live and work in multi‐story buildings, the delivery process may require a last step to transport the parcels from the building reception to the apartment or office of each customer. The distance traveled in this last transportation step is in the range of tens to hundreds of meters rather than miles or kilometers. For this reason, this paper defines this logistic step as a specific last meter delivery problem because of the particularities of the transportation challenges that must be addressed inside a building. Specifically, this paper reports the experiences with an autonomous mobile robot performing last meter parcel delivery in a multi‐story building. The main conclusion is that mobile robot technology is ready to efficiently implement the task of last meter parcel delivery inside multistory buildings.