Delivery robots made by companies such as Starship Technologies and Kiwibot autonomously make their way along city streets and through neighborhoods.

Under the hood, these robots—like most mobile robots in use today—use a variety of different sensors and software-based algorithms to navigate in these environments.

Lidar sensors—which send out pulses of light to help calculate the distances of objects—have become a mainstay, enabling these robots to conduct simultaneous localization and mapping, otherwise known as SLAM.