Key Takeaways
- Evri has launched Europe’s first trial of two-legged delivery robots, built by Japan’s Refined Robotics, on the streets of Barnsley.
- The robots carry parcels up to 15kg, move at up to 6km/h, and can climb stairs, cross uneven ground and get in and out of delivery vans.
- Barnsley was chosen because it is the UK’s first government-backed Tech Town, giving Evri a live testbed most carriers cannot access.
- The Barnsley trial runs alongside a separate Evri pilot of robotic parcel hubs with Collective Robotics in Bristol, which points to a sustained automation programme rather than a one-off stunt.
- Evri’s own language, flexibility for customers without sacrificing service quality, signals this is about commercial resilience, not novelty.
Disruption in last-mile delivery is not a phase to wait out, it is the new normal, and Evri’s decision to trial two-legged delivery robots in Barnsley shows which carriers understand that. As an Ecommerce Logistics Consultancy, Liberty Jai sees this kind of experimentation as exactly what separates carriers who plan for volatility from those who treat it as a passing inconvenience.
Why Evri Is Testing Robots On Barnsley’s Streets
Evri has partnered with Japan-based Refined Robotics to run the first trial of its kind in Europe: a two-legged delivery robot operating on real residential streets rather than in a warehouse demo. The robot can carry parcels up to 15kg, move at up to 6km/h, climb stairs, traverse uneven surfaces and get in and out of delivery vans on its own. It can run fully autonomously or under remote monitoring, which means Evri can support both attended and unattended deliveries without rebuilding its operating model from scratch.
Barnsley was not a random choice. It is the UK’s first government-backed Tech Town, which gave Evri a live environment to test the robot against real pavements, real doorsteps and real customers rather than a controlled trial site. Marcus Hunter, Evri Group CTO, framed the move as part of a continuous search for technology that adds flexibility “while maintaining the high-quality service our customers expect”. Nick Hafner, CEO of Refined Robotics, said the robot was “specifically designed to tackle some of the most complex challenges in last-mile logistics”, which is a pointed way of saying the easy problems in parcel delivery were solved years ago.
What This Means Commercially For Logistics Vendors
The detail that should catch a vendor’s attention is not the robot itself, it is that Evri is running this trial alongside a separate pilot of robotic parcel hubs with Collective Robotics in Bristol. Two live automation trials running at once is not experimentation for its own sake, it is a carrier building a portfolio of last-mile options so it is not exposed if one approach stalls or one technology partner underdelivers. That is resilience thinking applied to delivery infrastructure, and it is exactly the posture vendors need to adopt themselves rather than betting everything on a single carrier relationship or a single delivery model.
The concrete action for logistics vendors watching this is straightforward: start scoping which parts of your own last-mile operation could realistically absorb a robotic or autonomous delivery pilot now, in a defined postcode or customer segment, rather than waiting for the technology to mature somewhere else first. The vendors who run a small, controlled trial today will understand the operational trade-offs long before this becomes standard practice, and that knowledge is itself a commercial advantage.
If you want to stay ahead of these shifts, get in touch with the Liberty Jai team and find out how we can sharpen your sales strategy.
Evri’s Barnsley trial is a small signal of a much bigger shift: last-mile delivery is becoming a technology arms race, and the carriers and vendors who treat each new pilot as a data point rather than a gimmick will be the ones setting the terms by the time it matters.
Ready to grow your logistics business? Talk to Liberty Jai today and find out how our Ecommerce Logistics Consultancy expertise can open doors for your business.