Carrefour has commenced a delivery trial using autonomous robots in the coastal Belgian city of Knokke-Heist.
To avail of the service, customers place first place their orders via the Deliveroo app, which offers a selection of around 500 SKUs.
Following this, employees at the pop-up Carrefour location, at Lichttorenplein 7, load goods into the autonomous robot, which uses eight cameras to safely navigate the streets and give priority to road users and pedestrians.
The three robots, named Natacha, Nono, and Loulou, can use road crossings and are unable to be opened by anyone except the person who made the order. When at its destination, the customer scans a QR code and the compartment opens.
As part of the trial period, for the first few orders that were placed, Carrefour employees followed the robots to ensure that they did not run into any difficulty.
Additional Service
The service is offered at no additional charge to customers.
Deliveries are currently available to homes located within a 400-metre radius of the store.
The delivery robot trial will be in place until 15 August, with Carrefour hopeful that in time, it will be rolled out to other Belgian locations, including small and medium-sized towns where the retailer currently doesn't offer a existing home delivery service.
Public Roads
A similar trial project was launched by Carrefour Belgium in Zaventem in January, but this is the first time that the robots have been allowed to roll onto public roads.
Carrefour’s partner on the autonomous service is Turkish start-up Delivers.ai, which provides similar delivery services for other brands in Dubai, Madrid, Istanbul, Gdansk and Atlanta.
