We were told we’d have delivery robots by now. Where are they?

Car horns symphonise accompanied by a chorus of yelling cyclists as I shimmy on foot through oncoming traffic. Strictly, I come dancing on to the tarmac, cavorting between the lanes, prancing out of the way of motorbikes and generally tripping the traffic light fantastic.

Moments earlier, I had been cutting capers along the pavement, trying to dodge the shuffling dead of oncoming pedestrians whose universal attention was buried six foot deep into their smartphones as they zig-zagged directly into my path one after another every 1.5 seconds.

To be fair, some of them are evidently tourists being led in circles around town by Google Maps telling them to “turn left” two streets before or 30 seconds after they should have done so. The rest are local zomboids with their heads down – checking messages, sending emails, reading fake news and yelling into the wrong end of their handset because they said “OK boomer” when told it wasn’t necessary to hold it flat like a small tea-tray and move the same end alternately between ear and mouth.

As I have remarked before, although pavements were intended for use by people making their way about on foot, they are getting to be increasingly congested with vehicle traffic. When you’re not trying to dodge e-scooters and e-bikes hammering along at 35mph, not to mention the fleet of obese Davroses on their motorised fatmobiles, you have to dance around a winding trail of sprinting food delivery cyclists, twerking unicyclists and ollying skateboarders.

Every day it’s as if the circus has come to town. The pavement will soon be filled with elephants balancing on giant beachballs, women in sequin leotards riding white horses while juggling flaming torches, and clowns in a ‘comedy’ car whose exhaust backfires in a shower of smoke and sparks each time they mow down another pedestrian.

The one thing I’ve not had to dodge for a while is a delivery robot.

Just a few years ago I would regularly stumble across – or rather “trip over” – a Starship trundling across the streets of London with its human slave in tow, supposedly in preparation for a massive worldwide launch. Yet somehow I think I missed the final big, er, roll-out. Where are they?

This may be because I relocated away from London. Now that I am swanning around in the south of France – that reminds me: I must stock up, I’m running out of swans – I totally missed the explosion in delivery bots. Perhaps the pavements of the British capital is actually swarming with the little buggers. Funny that I never see them when I visit, though. Do they use facial recognition and hide whenever they see me?

Ah now, facial recognition is something I can deal with, ever since learning about an Italian clothing company called Cap_able. It makes jumpers that, depending upon your viewpoint, either have a summery Eighties vibe or look as if you’ve vomited down your front after guzzling 20 bags of liquorice allsorts. Apparently, this confuses facial recognition systems so that they think you’re a zebra or giraffe… or even an elephant balancing on a beachball.

But I digress. Why didn’t autonomous (or even remote-piloted) delivery bots go big-time during the Covid pandemic lockdowns? Surely that would have been the perfect moment for robots to take over the planet. Not only was there a significant uptick in demand for delivery-to-the-door, the pavements were free of people who might otherwise selfishly insist on walking on them rather than leave them clear for motorised traffic.

There had been talk of delivery bots being physically abused, so maybe that’s the explanation. I’m not quite sure if it would be worth the risk of being arrested for criminal damage after breaking into a Starship to steal the cheeseburger and fries that lie inside, but that’s human nature for you.

On the other hand… UK internet retail sales are said to be worth more than £133bn annually. Let's say a quarter of these are small goods that could be delivered by robot. You'd only have to break into 1 per cent of the automated courier bots to rake in £325m of stolen goods per year. That’s a lot of burgers.

Perhaps they could call it a ”stand-and-delivery” service, as highway robbery returns to civilised streets after a hiatus that lasted hundreds of years. There's market disruption for you.

But surely, you cry, a delivery bot is a mobile safe on wheels, built to be difficult to crack. Besides, aren't they designed to emit a piercing alarm when interfered with?

Oh great. Not only will I have to dance around avoiding the little buggers every few paces, 1 per cent of them will run around screaming like two-year-olds – which as every parent knows is approximately measurable at 172dB.

Even so, there are less crude approaches that digital highwaymen can take than the crowbar. I seem to remember industry commentators musing how criminals might try using EMI jammers to cut off a delivery bot's signals as it passes and whisk it away before either the owners or the robot itself knows what's going on. They could perhaps divert delivery drones into Faraday cage-style boxes which would block the tracking signals and webcam images from reaching base.

One simple way to make it more difficult for bot-nappers to get away with their naughty deeds is to make the delivery robot itself bigger. It’s one thing to surreptitiously raid a picnic basket on wheels, but an entirely more challenging prospect to attack a fridge freezer without being noticed.

A local company down my way, Twinswheel, has been experimenting with this approach. Not only are the bots relatively big bastards compared with the Starship, they are designed to appear thoroughly continental with housing that resembles classic French vans from the 1960s. Possibly they also have a cigarette hanging from a grille at the front and occasionally stop to argue pointlessly with other delivery bots before going completely off-piste to trundle after a young woman it has spotted through its arse-ial recognition system.

Who do these frog-bots think they are, eh? Still, it’s not as if an angry mob of Starships are going to take up pitchforks and torches and march on them.

Oh.

If the delivery item is small, the other main alternative is for the delivery to be made by drone. This has been shown to work. But in the same way that Twinswheel bots can only safely do their job within wide pedestrianised streets, airborne drones are only permitted to deliver to places that are entirely empty of people. I’m not keen on robots that trundle over my toes but even less so on those that descend suddenly from the skies and give me an unexpected haircut.

One solution I saw recently for this was for airborne drones to make their final delivery by zipline. That is, the drone hovers safely above inconvenient objects such as power cables, street furniture and human heads, and lowers its payload to the ground (or dedicated receptacle) carefully on wires.

That’ll be fun on a windy day. Good job climate change is not going to be an issue in the years ahead, eh?

Maybe I’ll just go to the shops instead. That is, assuming there’s enough space in the gutter for me to walk down between the busy traffic on the road and equally roaring traffic on the pavement.

It’s enough to make you go postal.