British shoppers looked on with surprise and delight as a supermarket worker casually handed over groceries to the newest members of the team — delivery robots.
"Where are you going?" one passer-by asked a white robot, resembling a small fridge on wheels. Another person stopped to wave it goodbye as it rolled off to drop an order to a customer's door in the central English town of Bedford.
"Robots won't be a thing of the future, it's a thing for now," said Andrew Curtis, head of U.K. operations at Starship Technologies, the world's largest maker of delivery robots.