Removing HGVs from high streets with last-mile human interactions

City councils and urban housing developers around the world need methods to remove heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) from pedestrianized city center shopping areas ("high streets"). Shops on high streets must regularly (a) receive deliveries and (b) have refuse collected, both by HGVs. Current advisory solutions include scheduling these vehicles at night, which creates nighttime noise and emissions pollution making city centers less attractive for urban living; or where such pollution is critical due to existing urban living, expensive infrastructure solutions such as designing underground tunnels for delivery. Urban living is environmentally efficient, aids regeneration and reduces the UK's housing shortage, and is important to encourage. There is a clear need for alternative urban systems to move goods and refuse to and from high streets. Our alternative is a fleet of small, electric last-mile delivery vehicles, driving on regular routes around high streets and to HGV interchange areas positions around the edges of high streets. The vehicles can be summoned to stop at shops and at parked HGVs by the retailers, to load and unload Deliveroo-sized standard boxes of goods and refuse. Unlike previous projects, they operate in dense pedestrian crowds and translate into commercial implementations newly researched algorithms for pedestrian interactions from a state-of-the-art EU research project. Unlike pure robotics projects our partners study the effects on urban planning systems and credible routes to market through existing international clients at city councils and housing developers.