Delivery robots – just a few years ago, the stuff of pure science fiction – are now very much a reality and quickly becoming a part of everyday life for many of us. In fact, I will usually come across five or six when I go for an evening jog in my hometown of Milton Keynes, England! These particular ones belong to Starship, a company that deployed its first autonomous delivery bots just three years ago and now operates a fleet of over a thousand, in several locations in the UK, USA, and very soon in mainland Europe too. I spoke to their CEO, Alastair Westgarth, who told me that his robots had traveled a total of 3.6 million kilometers to make 2 million deliveries. Powered by machine learning algorithms, they are constantly getting smarter, meaning they become more efficient as well as safer. Of these journeys, the vast majority are completed fully autonomously; however, human operators are always ready to step in when needed.

Google parent company Alphabet's internet-delivering balloon service and its drone delivery project have graduated from X programs to full-fledged businesses at Alphabet. From here, Alphabet says that Loon will maintain its mission of working with carriers worldwide to deliver internet to underserved areas. Wing will similarly continue building out its network of delivery UAVs, not to mention its air-traffic control system for the unmanned aircraft. And since the companies are their own entities now, they each have an official leader. Alastair Westgarth will serve as CEO of Loon, while James Ryan Burgess will fill the same role at Wing.

The FCC granted Alphabet's Project Loon, which delivers internet via balloons, an experimental license last month to help get Puerto Ricans online after Hurricane Maria decimated the island's infrastructure. While the team cautiously tweeted that it would'explore of it was possible to help,' Project Loon announced today that it has worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to successfully deliver basic internet to over 100,000 Puerto Ricans to the internet. Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. It's not a total success, which isn't to be expected after Puerto Ricans' communications infrastructure suffered so much damage. But the team was able to work with AT&T and T-Mobile to get "communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones," head of Project Loon Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post.