Nothing walks to your front door yet. The handover is the hard part.

Last-mile questions

Is there a legged robot that delivers parcels today?

No. Boston Dynamics published a doorstep demo in July 2026 and describes it in its own words as a demo while it looks for a logistics partner. RIVR, the ETH Zurich spin-off and the only European company doing legged delivery, was bought by Amazon on 19 March 2026 after two supervised pilots. Ford and Agility Robotics announced the same idea in 2019 and have not mentioned it publicly since 2020. Anyone who shows you a walking robot and a purchase order is showing you two things that do not belong together yet.

So why are the videos so convincing?

Because a demo is optimised for a camera and a route is optimised for the worst day of the year. The published pilots are honest about this: at Evri and at Veho the robot ran with the courier present and a remote monitoring team. Remote supervision is not a scandal, it is the current state of the art, and any vendor who leaves it out of the offer is not doing you a favour.

What is the real bottleneck, then?

The handover. A robot can cross a car park. What it cannot do without integration is ring an intercom, get a door released, reach the third floor, prove who received the parcel and deal with rain. Not one manufacturer publishes an intercom protocol or names a door-system partner, exactly as none of them publishes a lift protocol. That makes the door an integration item per site, not a product feature, and it is the work werob does.

Where do we start if we want to try this?

On ground you own. A campus, a works site, hospital grounds, a business park or a new quarter gives you a defined route, a clear approval path and a real handover problem to solve. Everything learned there transfers to the public pavement later, and nothing learned on the public pavement transfers back for free.

How is this different from your delivery solution?

Delivery and logistics is inside the fence: totes and pallets between dock, line and storage, on a site you control, with the warehouse system wired. Last mile starts at the kerb and ends at a door that belongs to someone else. Different regulation, different hardware, different failure modes. Most customers need both, and then they are specified as one chain.

What does German law actually say about pavement robots?

That they belong on the carriageway. A motor-driven robot is a vehicle under the StVO, and section 2(1) StVO puts vehicles on the carriageway, so pavement use requires an individual exemption under section 46(2) StVO together with section 70(1) no. 2 StVZO, granted by a Land or municipal authority. There is no federal one-stop shop. The Hamburg exemption for the Starship robots, public via a freedom-of-information request, gives the flavour: one accompanying person per robot, pavements at least one metre wide, at most fifteen robots per delivery area, no operation in fog or heavy rain, an indemnity for the city, and the explicit note that the permit sets no precedent.

Does the autonomous driving act cover this?

No, and this is the most common mistake in the market. Sections 1d to 1l StVG and the AFGBV require the vehicle to be registered under section 1(1) StVG. A robot with a design speed of up to 6 km/h falls outside the registration regime entirely under section 1 FZV, so the condition cannot be met by construction. The Conference of Transport Ministers acknowledged the gap on 25 and 26 March 2026 and asked the federal government to build a framework beyond the exemption regime. Until that exists, every deployment on public pavement is an individual permit.

What do you refuse to promise?

A cost per delivery. You will see comparison tables in this market with euros per parcel and per kilometre next to a robot that does not exist yet, and the numbers in them routinely contradict each other. We will model your route with your volumes and your labour cost, and show you the assumptions. What we will not do is put a saving on a page before there is a site.