Ahti Heinla, co-founder of Starship Technologies, explains why sidewalk robots do not currently use LiDAR and contrasts their stance with ideological opposition to LiDAR.
“The moment that that the lidar with suitable spec appears on the market, we will absolutely use it. So we are not like religiously anti anti lidar at all.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ahti Heinla
AssertionPartly supported
Starship Has Completed 8 Million Deliveries With Zero Street Thefts
“And actually none of your, our robots have ever been stolen from the street, and we have done eight million deliveries.”
Ahti HeinlaApr 28, 2025▶ 2:59Building the Future of Delivery with Robots | Ahti Heinla on TBPN
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Pedestrians Consistently Treat Delivery Robots With Friendliness Globally
“But in terms of actually how people treat robots, there's not much difference actually. People are actually really friendly towards, towards our robots. I understand it's really hard to believe, but that is actually true. It's completely true.”
Ahti HeinlaApr 28, 2025▶ 5:24Building the Future of Delivery with Robots | Ahti Heinla on TBPN
Opinion
Pure End-to-End Neural Networks Are Hard to Prove Safe
“It's not surprising to me at all that you can do it. The downside with that, it's very hard to prove that it is safe.”
Ahti HeinlaApr 28, 2025▶ 8:11Building the Future of Delivery with Robots | Ahti Heinla on TBPN
AssertionPartly supported
Starship Has 8 Million Deliveries Compared to Closest Competitor's 300,000
“We have done, you know, eight million deliveries. I'm not sure, you know, our closest competitor, there are lots of competitors, tens of competitors. Our closest competitor probably has done 200,000, maybe, or 300,000. Not sure. Something like that, right? Lik…”
Ahti HeinlaApr 28, 2025▶ 16:49Building the Future of Delivery with Robots | Ahti Heinla on TBPN
Disclosure
Starship Uses a Hybrid C++ and Neural Network Architecture
“We are actually not operating an end to end neural network. But we are operating a combination of, yes, C++ and neural network.”
Ahti HeinlaApr 28, 2025▶ 7:50Building the Future of Delivery with Robots | Ahti Heinla on TBPN
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Foundational AI Dramatically Reduces Human-in-the-Loop Needs for Starship
“Yeah, it is definitely helping and improving our stuff. I think we were in commercial quality operation already before that, but it is helping us tremendously for sure. Primarily it is clearly something that is is it dramatically reducing the need for this, yo…”
Ahti HeinlaApr 28, 2025▶ 9:47Building the Future of Delivery with Robots | Ahti Heinla on TBPN
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 500 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.