The English town of Milton Keynes is using a fleet of autonomous robots to deliver shopping supplies to healthcare workers and residents stuck indoors due to the coronavirus lockdown.

The robots have been a familiar sight in the town, where they have been delivering groceries for the past two years, but now with social distancing measures in place they are busier than ever.

Now the small bots are delivering goods for free to National Health Service (NHS) staff working long hours during the COVID-19 crisis.

“We want to make life a little bit easier for these people in these very, very stressful times,” says Henry Harris-Burland, of Starship, the company that makes the robots.

Honoured to be part of the solution

"Lots of them are doing ... 80-hour weeks and they don’t have time to go to the local grocery store, so they use our robots for their shopping," he said. "We’re honoured that we can be part of that solution."

In the past month, Starship has doubled its fleet of delivery robots in Milton Keynes to 70. They’ve completed 100,000 autonomous deliveries in the town, says Harris-Burland.

The knee-high robots carry a small red flag to make it easier to spot them as they do their rounds. They can travel on pavements at a top speed of about 10km/h.

They are big enough to hold several bags of shopping as well as a pack of bottles.