Starship Food Delivery launched on Washburn University’s campus Wednesday, Oct. 16, after fall break. Orders gets delivered from the Memorial Union, the Market and Lincoln Hall Dinning on the periphery of campus.
The app allows students and faculty to order food from anywhere on campus. The robots have been navigating campus for three weeks, getting the area mapped and programmed to understand the different routes.
Lance Zach, director of dining services, gave some pointers for signing into the Starship app.
“[Students] can use their dining dollars to order food and stuff,” Zach said. “When you sign in on the app, there are dozens of different campuses, but make sure you look for the Washburn University campus, and then you are ready to order.”
The charge for the food delivery is $2.99. As of now, there has been an average of 40 orders through the new delivery system.
“It is much cheaper than what you would get if you did an Uber or if you did one of the other courier delivery services,” Zach said. “The nice thing about ours is as soon as [they] place the order, we get the ticket and normally we have been taking about an average of about three minutes to make whatever they are looking for.”
The robots are run autonomously but can be monitored manually if needed. There are two compartments inside the robot; one is for soft drinks and the other is for food so it can stay cool or hot. The food delivery robot is resistant to weather conditions like rain and snow.
There is a special delivery option from Lincoln Hall which runs at night. Zach called it a “ghost kitchen.”
“[Lincoln] has premier hamburgers, premier wings and some other items like fried pickles. These are foods that you cannot get in the cafe,” Zach said. “We run that till about 9:30 at night for delivery although that kitchen stays open till 10 for people that would want to walk up and get the food.”
Elliot Weber, freshman pre-engineering major, has been an active user of Starship. As a person who lives on campus, Weber shared how the app is designed in a way where their dining dollars get linked to their account.
“I think it’s helpful in ways where if you live in the LLC and you want dinner but the cafe is closed, you could just order something from Lincoln,” Weber said. “You could be at a park, a bench hanging out with friends and you could just be like ‘Oh, I want a drink. Let me just order that,’ and it will just go where you want it.”
The robot leaves food at the entrance of buildings all over campus or to a specific location by either entering an address or dropping a pin on the map. For full security, once the food has reached the user, it has to be approved by them for the robot to open its compartment.
“It is just making sure that whoever ordered the food gets it…it asks you to unlock it so you just open it up and grab your food out of it. Then it will ask you to swipe to send it and it will just go on its merry way,” Weber said.
The launch of Starship has been in the works for about seven months, and the app has been receiving positive feedback from its users.
“There is a survey you can take on [the app] which we get to see the next day. There are a few things that, you know, say we messed up a drink on an order or something, it lets us know, [and] that allows us to make sure we correct that in the future.” Zach said.
Weber hasn’t been having any issues with the app so far.
“The app has had no issue from me. There’s been something I have noticed with the robots. They can spill the drinks pretty easily, but other than that I have a good experience with it,” Weber said.
Anyone interested in learning more about Starship can visit its page on the Washburn website.
Edited by Alijah McCracken, Jeremy Ford and Morgan Albrecht
