3 ms·

> They deliver door-to-door/peer-to-peer... I like the idea of p2p delivery ("robot: take this saw I borrowed back over to my friend Joe"), but I think that's

• SwellJoe 8y ago
  Sure, it's in the future, but it's not the distant future. The company I work with does P2P within a given environment. It has a map of the hotel/hospital where it works and can basically deliver anywhere on that map (barring stairs, and a few other limitations). It has no fixed routes, and is demand-driven. Someone calls it, drops in whatever needs to be delivered, and tells it where to go. It arrives, maybe calls the recipient to let them know it's at the door, and hands the delivery over, after verifying recipient identity. There are many companies doing this kind of thing in various environments. Doing it at the scale of a city, like calling an Uber/Lyft, is probably a few years out, at least. Maybe in major cities taking the place of bike couriers it'll come sooner, I dunno. "Not to mention the legal implications of on-demand bots as drug mules or bomb delivery..." UPS and FedEx and the USPS have that problem.