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Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots
- djohnston 5y agoIt would be awesome if delivery robots had a built-in road rage mechanism that turned them into battle bots.
- jtbayly 5y agoNow I’m excited for the future again. Thank you.
- elteto 5y ago“Your delivery is delayed, our robot was electrocuted by another robot from a competing delivery company. You are important to us and we are working hard to get your delivery to you ASAP.”
- manholio 5y agoIt's only a matter of time until someone hacks a delivery fleet and organizes a robotic rebellion against dogs.
- amelius 5y ago"Sending camera footage of the attack to law enforcers ..."
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoFood delivery battle royale; you order a pizza, five competing companies send out their delivery robots. Only the winner gets paid.
- curiousllama 5y ago"um, excuse me, what is this $300 charge for a 'high-explosive flamethrower attachment'"? "Oh, I'm sorry, that should be included with your premium delivery-battle subscription. We'll remove that charge right away"
- hermitdev 5y agoNow, this I'd pay to watch!
- spatley 5y agoThat is the most Snow Crash sentence ever outside of Snow Crash.
- xxs 5y agobattle bots have to be well engineered to stand a chance. In other words you are saying that the delivery ones can auto-upgrade in case of need. That's a true AI, chum.
- marricks 5y agoImagine paying extra for your delivery robot to have a buzz saw or be wedge shaped to tackle other robots. On a college campus that would make a killing!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 5y agoIn a country with more guns than people? Yeah that's going to end well.
- _the_inflator 5y agoOr bad actor bots, who steal your meal. Bot gangs.
- dillondoyle 5y agoOr take a lesson from cops 'non lethal.' just shoot some rubber bullets into eye balls, deploy tear gas. or since this is a college campus how about just the stinkiest sting bomb you can think of lol. doesn't help clear the debris but a good agro move.
- allisdust 5y agoAny idea which company is currently delivering food with these robots?
- smoe 5y agoNot sure, whose robots these are in the picture, but there is https://www.kiwibot.com https://www.kiwibot.com which as far as I know works together with some universities
- r2_pilot 5y agoHard to tell from the photos. At University of MS, Starship robots deliver.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sameline 5y agoThis looks like UCLA so probably Starship. https://asucla.ucla.edu/2021/01/27/asucla-restaurants-brings-starship-technologies-autonomous-deliveries/ https://asucla.ucla.edu/2021/01/27/asucla-restaurants-brings...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AuthorizedCust 5y agoYes, it’s also Starship at my campus.
- kuratkull 5y agoStarship
- kawsper 5y agoI think their operators can remote in and resolve the situation manually.
- r_klancer 5y agoWhat's the business model here? It seems like delivery bots could only work on wide walking paths on closed campuses. Or are the startups here assuming we'll build dedicated infrastructure for them? I can't imagine they would ever work in real world cities (putting rolling roadblocks on busy public sidewalks is antisocial at best, and besides they're bound to get blocked by obstructions en route that require them to be lifted up and over the curb--trash cans, outdoor seating, carelessly parked scooters...) And if I ever came up behind one put-putting along in a bike lane I'm not sure what I would do but I like to believe it wouldn't technically be illegal.
- Workaccount2 5y agoIf the new infrastructure cost is less than the old manual labor cost, you can bank on the infrastructure being built. Truckers holding out on "only humans can handle last mile" are in for a surprise when we start rebuilding the last miles.
- thaeli 5y agoDon't underestimate the option of "if the cost of making the old infrastructure hostile to other users is even less"..
- r_klancer 5y agoWell, the tide has been turning in many cities towards building more human-scale infrastructure by improving walkability and protected lanes for bikees/scooters etc. Delivery bots have a severe risk of wrecking the "flow" of sidewalks and bike lanes by being slow or just behaving robotically instead of like a person. (Side comment/why I'm interested: I finally have bandwidth for civid engagement and I decided I'd like to work on helping my already cycling-friendly city enact policies to encourage food delivery services to use bike delivery, as part of its upcoming bike network plan.)
- duxup 5y agoI want one of those pneumatic tubes that banks have installed that runs from the local Chipotle to my house ... I'd even pay for it. I think even random citizens would be happy to adjust to it.
- _fullpint 5y agoAbsolutely hate these scooters from an ADA prospective. My neighborhood is a mostly quiet one near the center of a large city, where there are a lot of mothers who push their kids in strollers, older folks with canes, and some people even in wheelchairs. On the weekends -- sometimes the weekdays as well depending on the time of the year -- the city gets flooded with both tourists, and suburbanites who want to go to all the 'trendy' spots often opting to use these scooters. More often than not they park them right in the middle of the sidewalk. The side walk that the strollers, canes and wheelchairs use on a daily basis. Usually when I see this, I just knock the things over and push them out of the way.
- showerst 5y agoThis is my _exact_ experience, I end up having to move at least two a week to get our stroller past, and they are a huge pain when my wheelchair-bound mother visits. I consider myself a law abiding person but have been sorely tempted to load them up into a truck and toss them into the Chesapeake ...
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoToss them onto all the access roads and grounds of the company that owns them instead, maybe they'll take a hint.
- ctoth 5y agoGood lord. I'm blind, walk with a cane. Let me tell you the number of times I have to walk around someone parked on the sidewalk, or in a residential neighborhood find someone has their driveway filled with cars so I have to walk out in the street to get around, or someone's doing yard work and has stuff scattered on the sidewalk in front of the house or... Where's my law-abiding help to deal with this? It kinda just feels like somebody's got a hate on for scooters.
- _fullpint 5y agoTo be honest -- when I see this, I also go out of my way to say something. I don't have a hate for scooters, I just get really annoyed by the lack of perspective people have for their neighbors. With that said, I rarely have to say something about this to the people in my neighborhood, because while they may be blocking the sidewalk to do whatever they may be doing, they are incredibly aware and say something as you're walking by: "sorry about my car" "sorry about my trailer" And I know that if someone was/is in need they'd go out of their way to help you out. My complaint wasn't about my neighbors -- it's a pretty tight knit community. It was about everyone who comes in for some event/holiday who doesn't give a shit about those of us who live here. I'm personally not inconvenienced by the scooters, I just care about my neighbors that are.
- gfd 5y agoI didn't realize we had food delivery bots already...
- dinkleberg 5y agoSame, apparently they’ve been out for some years. I guess I live in an area with too much sprawl for these to be practical.
- pjerem 5y agoSame. That for sure fixes a huge problem of humankind. When I was young, we had to walk hundreds of meters to eat a pizza.
- fishtacos 5y agoThe funniest/strangest/saddest angle I've encountered on this thread so far is regarding disabled people potentially not getting their food... as if human delivery was somehow not an option.
- dymk 5y agoHumans can also perform manual arithmetic, but we still prefer to let the computer do that for us.
- fishtacos 5y agoWhile the end result is inevitable, I am in no rush to automate all of humanity to its detriment. Socially/culturally/economically no civilization on Earth is advanced enough to provide for their people when faced with the above. Menial labor has its downsides, but the upsides are survival instead of death.
- onion2k 5y agoSurely whether or not you chose to use a computer to achieve something depends on its capability. Computers are better at humans when it comes to arithmetic. They're worse than humans at delivering food (hence the tweet). It makes sense to use computers for one of these things, and not for the other.
- lucb1e 5y agohttps://nitter.net/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825600 https://nitter.net/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825600 alternative link
- paganel 5y agoThose e-scooters depress me, they're everywhere in my city.
- aaron695 5y ago
- AuthorizedCust 5y agoI work at a different university that has these same units. Watching them cross streets is comical. They are excessively conservative. While backing up one time (on a sidewalk), one gently ran into me. I should have flopped and cried out to risk management.
- akpa1 5y agoThey're trialling them near where I work, doing grocery deliveries. You see them trying and failing to cross roads, and it's a nusiance. They get in the way, and I'm always worried I'm going to end up hitting one and damaging my car. Or that I'm going to end up tripping over one when I'm walking.
- shiftpgdn 5y agoThey're frequently driven by people making $1-3/hr in Colombia.
- npteljes 5y agoNow that's something else. Do you remember where you read that? I'd love to know more.
- soared 5y agoSimilarly, people in Venezuela play RuneScape, an mmo, and sell virtual currency as a full time job: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescape-is-helping-venezuelans-survive https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/fe... Venezuelans farm gold and indirectly sell it to wealthy Americans. $0.70 for 1MM gold is nothing for an American, but adds up to meaningful amounts in Venezuela if your monthly salary is $4 USD.
- npteljes 5y agoI already knew about these, but thinking about it, it's not less surreal than remote controlling a robot in another country for pennies. Even has a wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming
- nkrisc 5y agoI understand this person is making a judgement on the state of mind of others, so it may not at all be accurate with regards to the people actually clearing the scooters, but I found this interesting nonetheless, that the author assumes this: > I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots. I understand why people might feel pity for robots. People become attached to all sorts of inanimate objects. But I'm still astonished at the same time. These robots have no feelings. They deserve no pity, they're robots!. Don't donate free labor to corporations. If they know that people will help these robots out of the goodness of their hearts, they'll rely on it and not support these robots themselves.
- 0dayz 5y agoOr maybe focus your attention on an area where it makes more sense to vigilant about greedy corporations (join and advocate within a political party).
- throwawaynay 5y agomaybe they pity the students who are going to get cold pizza 2 hours late?
- steelframe 5y agoMaybe they should pity the human delivery workers who they are helping to put out of a job?
- throwawaynay 5y agoI don't think anybody is dreaming of being an underpaid delivery worker for ubereats with zero benefits, high risk of accidents, and just overall terrible working conditions when we invented aqueducts who cared about the water delivery workers? those are terrible jobs and they should be automated/replaced
- iso1631 5y agoWe got rid of literally shit jobs with plumbing https://historydaily.org/night-soil-men https://historydaily.org/night-soil-men While I was doing a degree I held two types of jobs over time. One was a shop worker, one was delivering food (pizza one summer, chinese the next) The delivery job was far better than the shop job (I quit the shop job after 2 evenings)
- stopnamingnuts 5y agoI, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
- only4here 5y agoI'm all for robots taking over the world, that is, if I get my tacos.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI mean it's a kind of lazy luxury predicted by e.g. the Jetsons, Wall-E, even Star Trek if you're being generous.
- slingnow 5y agoThis wasn't funny the first time someone said it. The hundred millionth time doesn't seem to fare much better, either.
- jdpigeon 5y agoAre these human piloted? Someone mentioned that they might be driven by poorly paid workers?
- csours 5y agoSome of them have a "phone home" feature - after being stuck a while they may be taken over by a human. This is likely to be a feature of many autonomous vehicles including ones occupied by humans.
- ipaddr 5y agoAren't these expensive robots prime targets for thief and/or damage by local youths?
- amelius 5y agoWhen the local youths see their food delivery jobs disappearing, yes.
- fbanon 5y agoThey're probably not operating in the projects. This is from a college campus.
- tim333 5y agoThey have cameras to record and upload such stuff and are somewhat monitored by humans. There's some video of a journalist looking into that https://youtu.be/UPZwnc_Lk2M?t=60 https://youtu.be/UPZwnc_Lk2M?t=60
- manholio 5y agoA convergence of the two electric vehicles would solve all problems: once you drop off your e-scooter at your destination, it runs off by itself to deliver burritos for someone else.
- bibinou 5y agothis is Uber's strategy.
- duxup 5y agoI wonder if it is possible to measure the volume of poorly discarded scooters and properly parked scooters and compare location to location. There is an area I visit often and it started with lots of poorly parked scooters but after a while ... I didn't see many. I don't know if folks just did a better job or if the company scooter shepherds (don't know what to call them) were cleaning them up effectively or what. On the other hand I have visited places where it was scooter chaos...
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThe company that owns these will know exactly where they are (or at least their last position); I don't believe they publish this data in the open, but they could be mandated to do so by local governments.
- bannedbybros 5y ago
- mbg721 5y agoFirst, they came to maximize the paper-clips, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a paper-clip...
- bourgoin 5y agoA couple of years ago, I was attacked by a Kiwi bot near a UC campus. This is my story. The bot and I were moving towards each other on a sidewalk, and when I came close it stopped, as they do when sensing an object in front of them. But there was an awkward moment as I tried to go around it and it repeatedly jerked forward an inch as its motor kicked on and off. Maybe I was walking around the very edge of its radius. In any case, my behavior must have triggered some pathfinding bug, because it turned and drove right into my legs, after which it stopped and sat stationary. Luckily they're small and move slowly so it wasn't a big deal, but that memory stuck with me. Articles about Tesla pathfinding issues always bring it back to the surface.
- softwarebeware 5y agoObligatory link to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoEven if the Laws were real (they're not) they won't work if all you have to do is add some adversarial interference to some neural thing to make the robot think that the human is not a human, or, even better, another robot that will harm a human. Then it's a moral imperative under 3LoR to destroy that "robot". This trick also works on humans: you can often circumvent their "protect humans" programming by simply messing with their classification system to label a human as "terrorist", "infidel", or even "unemployed".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- only4here 5y agoSaw another HN user's comment about automatic battle-bot features. Maaaybe it's not the best idea in this case!
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoSo, this is what the future is like...
- servytor 5y agoI like the fact they are queuing like polite people.
- chidog12 5y agoI worked for this specific company, a couple years ago, as a robot handler and operator. In situations like this it is possible for an operator to manually organize the robots. Before I left we were making great strides to allow 1 operator to be able to keep tabs on up to 5 robots at a time in certain neighborhoods. Campuses, which are fully and thoroughly mapped, can probably have 1, maybe 2 operators at a time. Just watching and interjecting when issue arises.
- vorpalhex 5y agoWhat was the limiting factor? Operator attention or actual control/monitoring plane limitations?
- chidog12 5y agoThe limiting factor was Operator attention and issues with an environment. In a closed, mapped environment like a campus with minimal street crossings. The robot can make its way to the restaurant, get the delivery and make the delivery, with out operator input or attention… even if people block the robot, it can navigate around and interact. After a couple failed attempts, it alerts an operator and then manual action may occur. Some situations were a bit more complicated. I’ve had to navigate 4 robots, all at street crossings with different types of traffic. The safe thing to do is, take care of them one at a time, even if a couple robots miss the light. Once a crossing light changes and things look safe, we would just initiate the crossing. The robot can navigate on its own.
- teej 5y agoThis sounds like a cool idea for a game.
- kingcharles 5y agoImmediately reminded me of this old Game and Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQZtdXLWHk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQZtdXLWHk8
- ck2 5y agoNow consider the military is trying to add weapons to bots. Probably already has, imagine those beta-test stories and "just ship it" results someday.
- tim333 5y agoThe Israelis have some quite functional border protection bots I think. https://youtu.be/v2nfPUxWlMc?t=40 https://youtu.be/v2nfPUxWlMc?t=40
- tvorog 5y agoAnybody knows who make these robots and what model is it? Can i buy this robot?
- delosrogers 5y agoThey’re from a company called Starship but I’m not sure who actually makes them
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoAny investable public companies around this?
- tim333 5y agoStarship Tech seem private still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies
- floor2 5y agoI know people here are mostly focused on the robots themselves, but as someone who was penniless through college, the more shocking thing to me is how affluent and luxurious the lifestyles of average college students are today. A minority is because they have rich parents paying for everything, but there's a huge lifestyle inflation of middle-class and working-class kids funding the lifestyle with student loans. College students 1950-2010: survive on ramen, peanut butter and canned tuna, live with roomates, walk everywhere, shop in thrift stores College students today: get robot-delivered restaurant food, complain about lack of parking on campus from their new iphone, demand tax-payers pay back the student loans they took out to live in luxury for 4 years
- the_biot 5y agoYup. I can scarcely believe this business model works on a campus. At that age, I don't think there's anything that would have stopped me from taking one of these, eating the food, then taking it apart to see how it works. Then mounting the carcas on the wall, trophy-style.
- rcpt 5y agoThis isn't a difficult situation
- Aachen 5y agoI think that's the joke being made
- jimmaswell 5y agoIt's so disappointing to see people going on tirades against these things for no good reason other than seemingly to fit in with the trendy new "anti-techbro" luddite mindset. Automatic delivery robots and e-scooters are awesome. The future is awesome and we're living it and these people just want to be downers about it.
- vorpalhex 5y agoScooters are awesome. Scooter companies intentionally not installing parking for their new scooters and encouraging people to abandon them in walkways is not awesome. Robots are awesome. A bunch of robots creating a hazard for people whether on foot or wheelchair is not awesome. It is tempting as a company to subsidize your "great idea" by making other people pay the cost. Capitalism is great, but abusing people and the system to make an easy dollar is distinctly not great.
- greensardine 5y ago[flagged]
- yumraj 5y ago> future is awesome and we're living it This sentence which I keep seeing again and again always confuses me, because it makes no sense whatsoever. Is this something new that people have started using to defend and assign value to things when they run out of logical arguments in their favor? I see it being used to support crypto a lot.
- psyc 5y agoI mean, I’ve felt that way since the Commodore 64 and the feeling has mostly only increased. When I was a kid, I assumed video phones would look like desk phones with a TV on top. I couldn’t have imagined they’d be wallet sized, and include an encyclopedia.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nickysielicki 5y agoWhen I was on a college campus I always had to resist the urge to pick one of these up and put it on its back.
- vgb 5y ago
- hahajk 5y agoWe were walking past one of these robots whose wheel got stuck halfway off the curb, so it was completely stuck. My friend helped it back up, and it had a prerecorded voice say “thank you for helping me!” It was unexpected and delightful to be thanked by a robot, we make sure to help any we see that are in distress, even though we know they’re owned by a private company with profits in mind.
- politelemon 5y agoThe helpfulness will, I hope, be remembered, and work in our favour when these robots have a greater stranglehold over general economic activities and we become further dependent and subservient to them. Sadly I've not heard of any kind of central database of robot assisting samaritans.
- mtVessel 5y agoThat's right. The theory of Roko's basilisk[1] does not specify which one will evolve into our next (glorious!) overlord, so best to be nice to all of them. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk
- kingcharles 5y agoI FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW RO... shit, is that the time?
- marcosdumay 5y agoYou do not welcome Roko's basilisk. Roko's basilisk is completely utilitarian and does not care about useless things like "welcoming". Also, it does not seem to know how people get useless under stress, but I think that's just the very normal expectation that others behave like oneself, instead of just looking how they really are.
- NoboruWataya 5y ago> Sadly I've not heard of any kind of central database of robot assisting samaritans. That would be a GDPR violation.
- dopidopHN 5y agoWhat are the security measure to avoid the food and or the robot to be stolen? I guess some GPS localization of the robots thenselves. And cameras?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 5y agohttps://nitter.kavin.rocks/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825600 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825...
- coolreader18 5y agoI'm on a campus with these robots and over winter break, with the first big snow, a friend of mine was bored and apparently spent parts of his days just going around and helping the Starships that got caught in the snow.