As it stands there are quite a few companies out there looking to make drone deliveries a reality, although we guess there is still a fair bit of legal and regulatory hurdles to overcome before that happens. However over in the state of Virginia, it seems that robot deliveries will soon become a thing.
This makes Virginia the first state in the US in which robot deliveries will be legalized. The new law is expected to go into effect come 1st of July, 2017 and was signed into law by the state’s governor last Friday. This was helped along by two Virginia lawmakers Ron Villanueva and Bill DeSteph who worked with Starship Technologies to help draft the legislation.
In terms of the limitations of the deliveries, as long as the robots do not exceed a speed of 10 miles per hour and do not weigh over 50 pounds, they’ll be allowed to move about freely as long as they remain on streets in a crosswalk. It will also need to be remotely monitored by a person in the event that something goes wrong, so while it can be fully automated, someone needs to keep an eye on it.
Delivery robots aren’t new and just like drone deliveries, they have been undergoing testing for a while now, but like we said with Virginia legalizing it, they will soon be usable by companies looking to help make their delivery process more efficient, and hopefully this new law will be adopted by other states in the US as well.