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Estonian winter 1, delivery robots 0
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoAny info on how they work when it's not snowing? If delivery robots get pedestrian and cycle lanes cleared of snow faster that feels like a win-win for everyone.
- black_puppydog 5y agoSeems more like a reflection of poor priority-setting, if it takes a commercial interest being harmed before people's direct interest are respected.
- perihelions 5y agoHow did they all end up in the same snowdrift? I'd love to see a Minard-type chart of the delivery routes, and the counts of how many robots dropped where...
- glanzwulf 5y agoI guess someone in SF forgot to account for bad weather in other parts of the world
- drclau 5y agoIt’s actually an Estonian startup: Starship Technologies. Engineering teams are in Estonia and Finland. You’d think they are familiar with snow there. :) “Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing small self-driving robotic delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and a satellite team in Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC and Mountain View, California.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies
- notimetorelax 5y agoLarger wheels was a P0 that then got demoted to P2 by a SF PM.
- glanzwulf 5y agoWell I'll be damned. Thank you for sharing
- moksly 5y agoDo they have these in SF? I thought Estonia was sort of special with these.
- syntaxing 5y agoThey have a pilot program in Mountain View. A couple of my coworkers purposely drove to a nearby park to try it out.
- pandemic_region 5y agoThey forgot to include a Snowbot in the convoy, rookie mistake. https://thesnowbot.com/ https://thesnowbot.com/
- dvh 5y agoSomeone should end their misery.
- everyone 5y agoThere's good eatin' in em.
- Hamuko 5y agoThis is why I have high amount of distrust towards self-driving cars - I always feel like no one has gone and tested them on an unplowed (or even plowed) piece of road.
- varajelle 5y agoI don't see the relation. This tweet is just a funny picture but I'm sure they manage just fine when the snow is removed. It's not difficult to find picture showing the same problem with normal car: http://spectrum-bend.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/article-1353073-0D05AC73000005DC-310_964x611.jpg http://spectrum-bend.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/article-... Edit: another one: https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1824899.html https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1824899.html hundreds of motorists blocked on the highway in france this week. Nothing to do with self driving car.
- ben_w 5y agoI think the relation is (concern about) insufficient consideration for diversity of real world environments. Looking at those wheels, I can only assume they were designed by someone who never experiences mild snow outside their home. Someone in San Francisco or Monterey, for example. Yes, even though the company is Estonian. I’m somewhat more trustful that self driving cars can cope with bad weather in particular, though the general principal “reality is hard” still applies: https://youtube.com/shorts/kM-xBgz26pE?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/kM-xBgz26pE?feature=share
- varajelle 5y agoBut why should self driving car be hold to higher standard than normal car? I mean, reality is hard also for humans. Like all these human driver stuck on the highway over night because they didn't think snow would block their car. What if something really unexpected happen? Actually autonomous car has more likelihood to react and stop the car in time than a human driver.
- Kye 5y ago
- butz 5y agoSnow is not that bad, but what about icing? It would be a fun view with all those robots gently sliding downhill.
- Hamuko 5y agoYou mean the stuff you put on a cake?
- yakubin 5y agoI was in Tallinn last September and saw a couple of these. They're pretty cute. One thing that bugged me was that when one of them crosses a street (using a pedestrian crossing), when it detects a car approaching, when it's in the middle of the crossing, it stops and goes back to the pavement it was on originally, instead of continuing to move forward, which would take either the same or even less time. What's the logic here?
- polack 5y agoIt's "impossible" for such robot to have the situational awareness of a human. So probably a safeguard against it moving out on a place of the road where it isn't supposed to be.
- netizen-936824 5y agoWhy? Can the robot not detect adjacent moving objects? Can it not detect how far away the other side of the street in? It sounds to me like it just needs better programming (and maybe more sensors?)
- numpad0 5y agoYeah it needs better programming aka general intelligence.
- netizen-936824 5y agoRight, I agree. But I'm just challenging the notion of impossibility. It actually doesn't seem to be that complex of an issue as long as the object detection us solid ( coming from my biased perspective). Maybe challenging, but nowhere near impossible
- TheDesolate0 5y agoWhich is something you won't find at Amazon.
- ejb999 5y ago
- pharke 5y agoLooks like they might just need higher ground clearance and some snow tires. They're so low right now they look like they were designed for indoor use.
- datameta 5y agoYeah, looks like the underbody is beaching onto the snow. Higher wheel diameter, wider tire, and deeper treads would do the trick here.
- locallost 5y agoIt's a bit funny, but not really. If I pushing my daughter in a stroller, and they blocked the way like that when it's already difficult to walk in the snow I would literally kick one to the curb. I'm tired of the sidewalk being used as a dumping ground for every possible thing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jasonhansel 5y agoNot sure why this is getting downvoted. Wheelchairs, in particular, require at least a 3-foot-wide clear path, and many wheelchair users wouldn't be able to just "kick one to the curb." It's not quite clear to me if that would be an issue on this particular sidewalk, but it does seem like an oversight in the design of such systems.
- locallost 5y agoI don't mind, maybe my language was unnecessarily aggressive, and things can be funny without looking at the big picture. But overall, I have zero patience left for anything that blocks my way on the sidewalk out of sheer convenience for them. The attitude that a sidewalk can be used for whatever just because people are flexible needs to change because it's not true. Plenty examples above.
- clon 5y agoAbsolutely. Sidewalks were never meant for meandering robots. At the very least we should tax those stupid things as they consume a public resource.
- solarkraft 5y agoI want to know what they were thinking. "Alright, 10cm of snow ... send out the bots that are completely unfit for these conditions!" While questionable considering the location, of course it's fine to not design them to work in snow. What baffles me is that they didn't design them to work in snow and sent them into the snow. Considering that it's a lot of them in a bunch I can imagine that the bots had just started from their garage. Maybe this was some internal test? I can't imagine somebody consciously decided to let these things go through snow and operate normally. And surely there's that amount of human oversight ...
- tdrdt 5y agoMaybe the snow came by surprise. There have been a lot of sudden snow lately. In the UK 50 people were stuck in a bar and I believe in Denmark people had to stay the night in IKEA. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/europe/england-pub-snow-storm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/europe/england-pub-... https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/03/shoppers-snowed-in-at-denmark-ikea-are-forced-to-sleep-in-stores-beds-15707354/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/03/shoppers-snowed-in-at-denmark...
- iso1631 5y agoThat snow wasn't unexpected, people went to the inn fully knowing there was a high chance of being stuck there, same happens at places like the Cat and Filddle, or Kirkstone Pass
- Strom 5y agoThere was rapid snowfall today, but certainly not a surprise. The local media has been warning about a snowstorm for about a week. Also, most of the snowfall happened during the night, so it was almost all there by the morning.
- jazzyjackson 5y agomaybe the sidewalks were plowed up till this neglected stretch (just a guess)
- aaron695 5y ago
- bavxo 5y agoThe chilling effects of global warming.
- coinerone 5y agoThis reminds me that I need to change my Tires!