Dear Brandeis Student Community, 

 Kiwibot is incredibly grateful for the campus community’s warm welcome. We have already delivered over 1,700 orders to date. We are a startup founded by students just like you who were determined to change the world of food delivery for the better. With a lot of hard work, constant iteration, research, and innovation, we’ve grown and expanded our fleet across 8 universities in the U.S. since 2017. 

Our founding mission was, and still remains “to offer students a seamless, low-cost, and safe delivery service with a positive environmental impact.” Having an open and positive relationship with the student community is our number one priority. Therefore, we’d like to address some of the recent student concerns regarding data collection, security, and the attitude of some members of our robotic fleet. 

All semi-autonomous technology, including Kiwibot, uses cameras and sensors to help with localization, visibility, and mapping; thus enabling Kiwibot to effectively deliver orders safely while navigating highly complex situations. We are happy to report that 90% of our orders reach you in 25 minutes or less. We are committed to continual improvement, and you will see us make progress in this area. 

On this issue of data collection, all sensitive information detected by Kiwibot, such as faces and license plates, are anonymized and are not recorded or stored unless the bots are subject to an accident. Further, when a human operates the robot remotely, images are received at a lower resolution, intentionally, to conceal identities. Bottom line, we will never share your information and we do not store any data of this kind. 

In response to our robots’ facial displays seeming creepy or unsettling, and also cute and charming: we find this an important part of our robot’s personality. Just like the humanoids on campus, they too have feelings. We are continually researching how students interact with the Kiwibots to revamp the design aesthetic and are already incorporating your feedback into the fleet’s AI attitude. 

We truly want the community of Brandeis to be completely comfortable alongside the Kiwibots on campus, and reiterate that our robots are not surveillance tools. 

If you have any questions, concerns, or are simply interested in getting to know the Kiwibot team, please get in touch: john.tarin@kiwibot.com. We are always open to feedback and are devout in our belief that students should be at the center of how our new mobility solutions are deployed. 

All the best, 

Kiwibot team