Cal Poly Dining has officially partnered with AV Ride to deploy a new fleet of Grubhub food-delivery robots across the campus, replacing Starship Technologies following its departure from the higher education sector in June 2026. Fully funded by Cal Poly Partners, the autonomous deployment utilizes advanced LiDAR-based navigation to combat the campus’s hills and signal-free crosswalks, with administrators aiming to cut delivery times in half.
Navigating Campus Topography With LiDAR Navigation
When Starship Technologies wound down its higher education operations in June 2026, it offered a transition plan for the 2026-2027 school year for all schools that previously partnered with Starship. For Cal Poly Dining, however, the vendor exit served as a strategic inflection point. The previous autonomous units frequently struggled with the physical geography of the campus—specifically hills and complex crosswalks lacking traffic lights or signals.
To solve these routing failures, Cal Poly Partners Director of Commercial Services Russell Monteath spearheaded the transition to AV Ride. The new hardware architecture introduces a sophisticated Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based driving system. The AV Ride units use active laser scanning to map surrounding topography in real-time, calculating precise vectors for speed, size, and spatial positioning. This allows the chassis to safely negotiate unsignaled crosswalks.
“The move to new robots really starts with our goal of providing convenience to students and giving them time back in their day,” Monteath explained regarding the deployment. “Robot delivery is one of the ways we can do that by making it easier for someone to get a meal when they may not have time to walk across campus.”
Operational Metrics and Student Impact
Beyond sensor suite upgrades, the physical payload capacity has been scaled up. The AV Ride units will be larger, leaving more room for food, with units dispatched from campus hubs like the 1901 Marketplace and Poly Canyon Village dining outlets. Cal Poly Partners has fully underwritten the financial rollout, setting a goal of cutting end-to-end delivery times down to half the duration recorded by the outgoing Starship fleet.
For students balancing academic schedules, autonomous delivery serves a utilitarian function. Maren Thorpe, a food science sophomore, relied heavily on the legacy bots during periods of illness. “Last year when I was sick a lot, it was so nice to have a robot come to me and I didn’t even have to think about it,” Thorpe noted, confirming her intent to utilize the upgraded AV Ride fleet.
Operational reliability remains paramount for campus dining staff as well. Gabrielle Roche, a 1901 Marketplace employee and political science sophomore, experienced firsthand the logistical bottlenecks caused by the previous hardware. “They had trouble staying on route. Sometimes a robot was supposed to be at our restaurant but got stuck somewhere on its route,” Roche said. With the integration of LiDAR spatial mapping, campus logistics coordinators expect a drop in retrieval interventions, ensuring that orders move seamlessly from kitchen counter to student destination.
