Outdoor Unmanned Delivery on Campus: A 6-Month Pilot Report

The setup

A 24,000-student campus ran three outdoor delivery robots between a central parcel hub and six residential clusters for six months. Routes totalled 3.4 kilometres and crossed two road crossings and one plaza.

Numbers

• Deliveries completed: 4,300.
• On-time arrival within the promised window: 94 percent.
• Average round trip: 11 minutes.
• Manual interventions: 2.7 percent of trips, mostly pedestrians blocking a crossing.

What stops an outdoor robot

Rain is manageable. Standing water is not. Heavy snow, and any surface with more than a few centimetres of slush, forces a stop. Wind above roughly 12 metres per second also triggers a safety halt. Plan a covered docking point and a fallback schedule for those days.

What students thought

Satisfaction tracked reliability rather than novelty. Once delivery windows held for three consecutive weeks, usage stopped depending on novelty and became routine.