BALTIMORE – Salisbury University students are getting lunch delivered by robot — and the service is catching on faster than campus officials expected.

Since the fall semester, students living on campus have been able to use Grubhub to order deliveries from four campus restaurants for a flat $3.50 fee. Options include Chick-fil-A; coffee and pastries from Cool Beans Cafe and Chesapeake Coffee Roasters; and breakfast, lunch and dinner from Hungry Minds.

George Oakley, head of dining services, said 15 campus delivery robots have made 4,600 deliveries since February. They peaked at 188 deliveries in a single day and average about 110 per day.

“It’s about double what I thought it was gonna be,” Oakley said.

He said delivery robots are becoming more common on college campuses. In Maryland, he said Towson uses a similar program through Grubhub.

“The president of Salisbury University recently expressed an interest in looking into it more seriously, so we went through our Grubhub rep, who suggested several different vendors and Avride was the one we chose,” Oakley said.

The small, white rectangular robots run on four wheels. Top-loading hatches can hold up to six 16.5-inch pizzas and five 1.5-liter bottles, according to Avride’s website. The robots are fully autonomous once routes are mapped, and the front display shows triangular LED “eyes” that blink and gesture as they move through crowds.

Student Nico Kelley said she’s ordered five or six times since the service started.

“I love it. I think they are adorable,” Kelley said. “I started using it pretty much right [as] semester began, mostly purely out of curiosity.”

Kelley said she lives in Seagull Square and often orders from Hungry Minds.

“I don’t always feel like walking over there, especially when it’s raining,” she said. “So, I order from there a lot … if I don’t feel like fully walking over.”

Kelley, who works at Cool Beans, said she’s also loaded the robots.

“I think they’re user-friendly, and it’s just so convenient not having to worry about walking somewhere to go pick up what I want,” she said.

For now, the robots only deliver on the main campus. Oakley said the plan is to expand to the “east campus” off Route 13 by next fall, along with adding a fifth vendor, Books and Bread.

Oakley said he hopes more students will try it as the service expands.

“Download the Grubhub app and give it a shot,” he said. “It’s super convenient and it brings the food to you.”

Last year, Towson University introduced five Starship Technologies autonomous food-delivery robots on campus. Operating through the Grubhub app, the robots deliver from campus eateries to more than 50 locations. Users pay a $3.49 service fee with the fleet.

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