Food delivery riders work hard every day to get our meals delivered to us.
But it looks like they have some competition coming their way.
On Sunday (11 Apr), a food delivery rider making a delivery at National Technological University (NTU) spotted a food delivery robot.
He humorously challenged it to a territorial fight in a TikTok video, prompting netizens to joke that the bots are truly taking over.
In the video, the delivery rider could be heard jokingly instigating a fight with a cute, smol self-driving food delivery robot at NTU.
He says in a serious tone that he is the one who delivers food around here.
The rider then stresses that he’s the delivery rider working here at NTU, panning the camera down to show his bicycle and Grab app.
As if sensing the threat, the delivery robot slows down for a short while before continuing its journey.
The rider continues shouting “Oi!” and challenging the robot to a fight as it nonchalantly passes him by and travels up the pavement.
Plus, the adorably innocent face printed on it only adds to the hilarity of the video.
The TikTok video soon went viral and garnered over 56,700 views and 7,000 likes at the time of writing.
Netizens quipped that the robots are truly taking over.
This netizen questioned the rider how he could bear to fight such an “innocent” looking robot. To which, the rider laughingly replied that the robot was stealing his livelihood.
Another joked that the robot just wheeled away, perhaps it was clearly intimidated by the rider.
These self-driving delivery robots Foodbots were created by NTU student start-up Whizz Mobility. They aim to introduce a safe way to make contactless deliveries during the pandemic.
It started operating at the NTU campus back in Jun 2020. As of Feb 2021, it has already delivered over 6,000 food orders.
While small and compact, these Foodbots can actually carry a load of up to 50kg.
According to NTU’s press release, they travel along pre-mapped routes at a safe speed of 5km/h.
But it still requires students to use the cameras and algorithms to help it navigate around effectively.
More expansions of the project are in the horizon as well.
As technology advances, more services are gradually being handed over to robots to take care of.
Thankfully, for delivery riders, it’ll still be awhile before these robots can replace them.
And in any case, nothing can beat the face-to-face interactions we have with our delivery riders or the truly great content they give us like this TikTok video.
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Featured image adapted from TikTok.
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