Amazon.com Inc. has deployed autonomous delivery robots in Irvine, California, to ferry packages to consumers’ homes.

The self-driving couriers, which were put into service today, are part of the online retail and tech giant’s Scout project. The Scout (pictured) is a six-wheeled rover about the size of a cooler that can travel on sidewalks at a top speed of four miles per hour. Amazon has been testing the robot near its Seattle headquarters in Snohomish County, Washington, for the past few months. 

In Irvine, a fleet comprising a “small number” of Scout units will deliver packages Monday through Friday during daytime. Amazon employees will initially trail the rovers to monitor operations. The new environment should provide valuable training data for the Scout’s artificial intelligence, which has the complex task of navigating around pedestrians, skateboards, lawn chairs and all the other obstacles found on crowded urban sidewalks.

The fact that the robots are ready to handle customer packages indicates the AI is already fairly mature. Amazon has been working on the project since at least 2017, when it quietly acquired a startup called Dispatch Inc. to boost its nascent urban robotics initiative.

“To kick-start our journey, we created dedicated hardware and software labs in Seattle,” Sean Scott, the vice president of Amazon’s Scout group, detailed in the announcement for the Irvine pilot. “We don’t need to wait on external parts or software updates; we can rapidly prototype hardware components and write new code, and are able to validate our efforts in real-time.”

Several startups have launched competing autonomous delivery programs since Amazon bought Dispatch. Among them is Kiwi Campus SAS, which operates courier rovers at the University of California, Berkeley and is in the process of expanding to 15 more campuses. Established logistics providers are joining the fray as well: FedEx Corp. recently started testing a lidar-powered robot called SameDay Bot that can carry 100 pounds.

The competition in the autonomous delivery market is not limited to ground-based transportation. Amazon is currently deploying a homegrown, hexagonal courier drone that can take off like a helicopter and fly like a plane with up to five pounds of merchandise. About 80% of Amazon orders are under five pounds, which means drones could eventually play a significant role in the company’s last-mile logistics network.

Photo: Amazon