People of Monaco, meet ALF, La Poste’s experimental new tracking robot who for 15 days will carry packages and mail for selected postal workers aiding in the delivery process and creating a thoroughly modern postal system.

ALF is short for Assistance to Logistics Factor and its primary function is to improve the working conditions of local postal delivery people by doing the heavy lifting. La Poste aims to make the tracking robot available to mail carriers in several formats if the initial experiment proves to be a success.

ALF is designed to follow postal workers at a constant distance of 50 cm behind and does so using something dubbed the “follow me mode”. This mode “learns” how the carriers walk and uses leg recognition to create a blueprint for accurately following them.

The automated tracking robot currently being tested has a capacity of 1m3, which equates to a large volume of mail, two regular trollies worth, that can be delivered without as much wear and tear on the worker.

This initial test will cover the eastern sections of the Principality, covering areas on and around Boulevard de Moulins and Boulevard d’Italie.  

La Poste expects to have five ALF robots in use by 2020.