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Gita – autonomous lightweight delivery system
- johnnydoe9 10y agoThe video looked like a comedy sketch, it seriously does not look real to me with weird shaky cam shots of people's eyes and "we imagine this future" type dialogue.
- sneak 10y agoI want a city or neighborhood hooked up to a pneumatic tube system, like they have in bank drive-throughs, and I want at least one node of the pneumatic router network to be in an Amazon warehouse, and at least one other to be at a decent cheeseburger shop. Make sure it's wired for fiber internet and I will buy a condo in that development. Imagine ordering something up to the size and weight of a 3.5" HDD (or bacon double cheeseburger) and having it magically appear in your kitchen five minutes later. If these things became prevalent, packaging could standardize on the capsule cylinder size, like shipping containers. Units containing e.g. 500mL of milk or 5-7 eggs would be perfect.
- amelius 10y ago> I want a city or neighborhood hooked up to a pneumatic tube system Hyperloop? [1] :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
- sbanach 10y agoEM Forster took your thought experiment to it's logical conclusion for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
- sneak 10y agoThat's probably where I got the idea originally, tbh. I adore that story.
- icebraining 10y agoAre you willing to move to the UK? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodtubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodtubes
- foota 10y agoTry going back seventy years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...
- yellowapple 10y agoAre you in Minnesota, by chance? http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMM82_Pneumatic_Air_Drive_Thru_McDonalds http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMM82_Pneumatic_Air_Drive... But yeah, that'd be pretty awesome.
- mncharity 10y agoHave you seen Sand Flea jumping onto building roofs? http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html So instead of tube, how about a delivery robot that's like an alley cat? One which grew up watching Indian Jones and superhero cartoons. And loves tightropes. And wants to be flying squirrel. And is wired into Google RealTime City Map... I haz the cheezeburger. My human customer hungrily awaits. So I roll down the alley, and around the trash. Pause for traffic, and scoot across the street. Time for my usual northbound path. Up onto the roof. Down a toll zipline to another roof. Leap, wings out, glide, grab a street-pole cable, wings in. Roll along the cable, dodge pole, cable, pole, cable, etc. Roll down a quiet side street. Roof, alley, jump fence. Quick charge station. I consider Uber, but no! Here comes city bus #1726! Leap, electromagnet, hitchhike. Drop, wait for light, down sidewalk. Jump to porch, landing before the hungry human. A human lucky that it is I, city cat, that haz their cheezburger. And not some blind dumb hulking oft-clogged brute of a straw. Though if the straw ever gets built, I may ride that too. I take my bow, and my leave. What constitutes travel infrastructure depends on what you can cope with. Wrt power, mechanics, sensors, information, and computes. It may be that those advance more rapidly than our ability to build large-scale physical-plant infrastructure. Like cars were easier than moving sidewalks. Robots that can use custom infrastructure where it exists, but can cope "on the ground" in the infrastructure gaps, would have higher complexity cost than say drones. But as costs change... And hybrids may be interesting. The midday Amazon truck drives down the main road, shedding drones and robots, and taking on those dropped in the morning...
- crooked-v 10y agoThat third paragraph could make for an awfully interesting short story. It would just need a bit of plot or social commentary added beyond just playing around with the initial idea.
- Nzen 10y agotl;dr It's a 2 foot cylindrical robot for carrying 40 lb of stuff alongside/behind you as you walk. Can move at walking-running speed of a person. Unveiled two days ago; no indication of when this is ready for general consumption. Gita is an italian word, appearantly. Their yt channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAynoPCMT5etFQp_hJB4DGQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAynoPCMT5etFQp_hJB4DGQ/vid...
- tomlong 10y agoI thought this was going to be git based CI software..
- tomcam 10y agoA boy can dream, can't he?
- paulddraper 10y agoI have been dreaming about this for a long time...I'm gonna make it someday.
- fiatjaf 10y agoAre you serious? An autonomous robot that can walk alone in the streets and carry a lot of stuff inside?
- icebraining 10y agoSeems like it's not really designed for walking alone in the streets. All the autonomous operations are portrayed indoors.
- riffraff 10y agothe text says that in environments it knows it can travel by itself, and handle obstaclers and stuff. AIU the operational concept should be: show the thing one route once and it will be able to retrace it.
- joakleaf 10y agoSounds a lot like the robot from Starship Technologies; https://www.starship.xyz https://www.starship.xyz
- amelius 10y agoLooks like an automated suitcase trolley. It could be handy, except ... you probably can't take it on the bus/train or put it in a car or take it on an airplane.
- amelius 10y agoAlso, it could be used by bad guys as a very dangerous delivery mechanism.
- pugworthy 10y agoAs can about anything capable of carrying things, including people themselves...
- dexterdog 10y agoYeah, but people require a lot more investment to get them to the point where they are useful.
- vidarh 10y agoOr you just drive a car somewhere, and walk away, which is a well tested delivery mechanism with far more capacity.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoThat horse left the barn a long time ago. You can strap some c4 to a drone very easily. You could do the same with an RC car cheaply 30 years ago. We aren't safe because it's difficult to hurt someone. We're safe because we keep an eye on the people who would do us harm.
- bigiain 10y agoAlternatively: "We're safe because most people aren't jerks." Ascribing general personal safety to surveillance doesn't ring true to me. (It's _possible_ that surveillance mitigates extremely rare but extremely serious dangers to safety, but evidence of that seems scarce...)
- BlytheSchuma 10y agoI would love to engineer this to avoid homeless people taking shits in this thing. It would have to pivot better than an NFL quarterback. Lets assume that most homeless people are older 40+ and have bad knees and can hobble about 7 MPH on average. So they would have to catch this thing to take a shit inside of it.
- haldean 10y agoThis comment is disturbingly inhumane.
- Animats 10y agoStarship Technologies has a similar robot.[1] They asked the Redwood City city council for permission to operate this on Redwood City sidewalks. This was granted. Startship made a video of a delivery from La Tartine, which is a downtown bakery. But I asked the clerks at La Tartine, and they haven't seen the robot again since the video was made months ago. Both Gita and Starship have the feel of a startup with a great video, but problems delivering the product. These robots don't have the speed and range for a suburban environment, and they can't deal with doors, stairs, and elevators in apartment buildings. That leaves a narrow market niche. [1] https://www.starship.xyz/ https://www.starship.xyz/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc
- foota 10y agoSeems like theft might be an important practical concern for autonomous delivery.
- Animats 10y agoFor Starship, they have a remote voice link to the thing, and if someone is messing with it, central control can yell at them or send siren sounds. It locks remotely; people can't just open it easily. Someone could steal the whole thing, but its location is known and it has already sent video of people approaching it. Besides, stealing from it probably just yields a pizza, a Chinese dinner, or some random groceries. Redwood City is a good test site for this, because it has both good and bad neighborhoods close together. They can find out how much people will bother it.
- serf 10y agoPeople will steal/vandalize it simply because it's strange and (probably) expensive itself, not only for the cargo. For historic context see the early adoption woes of traffic and speed cameras. A siren, cameras, and GPS feedback doesn't help against a molotov cocktail thrown with a mask, from around a corner, or high above; and lots of people don't like the idea of robots roaming the streets.
- obilgic 10y agoI haven't seen such a useless 'take a look' video edit: second video
- foota 10y agoDid anyone else that watched the video feel extremely uncomfortable with the comparison of a sherpa to a robot?
- tomcam 10y agoAffirmative
- 2pointsomone 10y agoWhat's with the name Gita? You know it is the name of the holy book of Hindus, right? Then again, there is the infamous tech book series "Bible".
- lowglow 10y agoAt Asteria, we were looking for a proof of concept implementation of something we're working on. One of my friends worked as an engineer/designer at Buell (motorcycles), is a mech engineer, has done loads of work on electric vehicles, and is interested in autonomous vehicle tech. He flew out here and we decided to walk the streets of San Francisco to consider dimensionality required to successfully autonomously navigate sidewalks downtown. Our test was just delivering keys from my place (Stock + Sutter) to a friend's house (Gough + Market). The problems with traffic, pedestrians, accessibility, streetlights, construction, parked cars (illegal, lyfts, etc), pets (and their poop), business signs, trash, human activity blocking the walkways, curb hopping, lane blocking, etc. There are a designs that could accomplish dealing with a couple of these things, but nothing amazing and easy to implement that would satisfy any reasonable payload without looking/being/feeling cumbersome. Maybe with deployment, social etiquette might change, but in the long run it might be easier to have the city think about implementing lanes/infrastructure for last mile autonomous logistic vehicles to operate. This is why you typically don't see any autonomous vehicle/agents like this navigating any sort of street with real life obstacles.
- trome 10y agoYour going to be competing with Vehicles or Pedestrians one way or the other, I highly doubt any city is going to blow tens of billions on a grade separated autonomous delivery thoroughfare. Most cities are barely willing to put paint down for bike lanes, let alone create a physical barrier so they are safe for cyclists to use daily. Unless you are restricting deliveries to within 2 or 3 miles of where they start from (considering people walk at 3mph, and Segways were banned from sidewalks for going 10mph) you will probably be on the roadway.
- lowglow 10y agoWell 2-3 miles is fine, especially if you're considering graduated deployment of autonomous vehicles. I'm a big proponent of refactoring the world to facilitate autonomous agents within our lives, so I think spending money to figure this out is part of what we should be doing. Perhaps we need more people with similar opinions in government.
- Proven 10y agoThought it's a push version of Git.
- Untit1ed 10y agoCool how similar it looks to the WW2 Kugelpanzer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer
- aiNohY6g 10y agoLooks _a lot_ like TwinswHeel, which was just presented at the CES. http://twinswheel.fr/ http://twinswheel.fr/
- ragebol 10y agoWhat I like mostly is that more and more companies are feeling confident enough to put more-or-less autonomous robots in real-world environments. That's different from the military using drones, which are highly trained operators with robots in the air, which is a lot less cluttered.
- jelliclesfarm 10y agoI love it! It reminds me of Terry Prachett's traveling trunk aka 'Luggage' from the Discworld series..that is only half suitcase and the other half's a homicidal maniac. It is made of sapient pearwood and is awfully protective of its owner..can't be stolen..will fly into a homicidal rage of owner is threatened. I would have named it after Terry Pratchett..had Gita been mine..oh well..
- unboxed_type 10y agoIs it legal to use such robots in human-populated environments like office building or factory? What if it causes harm to somebody? Any thoughts?