Food delivery robots are struggling to steer clear of Chicago’s bus stop shelters. Within just 48 hours, two autonomous couriers from different companies veered off course and collided with shelters shattering glass and alarming nearby residents. These pair of dramatic incidents come amidst brewing tension among community members and lawmakers in Chicago who oppose the robots’ presence. The crashes also come just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced it was integrating a new mapping system trained on “Pokémon Go” data which is designed to improve navigation accuracy.
They get to abuse public infrastructure to build their stupid little robots tax free, and we get to pay for the repairs with our tax dollars.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
How fucking hard is it to put a $2 ultrasonic distance sensor on the front. I built robots when I was a kid that wouldn’t do this.
This has been solved for 50 years FFS. Yet here we are with techbros thinking cameras can solve everything.
That 2$ is subject to cost cutting
($2 * number of robots * labor cost to install one * labor cost to update and integrate) > (cost of settling potential lawsuit)
publicly traded companies are actually super predictable
Flip your local bots. Or harvest them for parts aand free snacks, if youre extra cool.
Heroes.
These bots can be helpful for the elderly or those with disabilities. It’s probably more effective to legislate them at the municipal level.
You don’t actually care about that. A year or so ago i had to get knee surgery, was walking with a cane. These things were a menace. Almost knocked me over every time they passed, including towards traffic while crossing the street. I coulf have died. Know a guy whos chairbound. Hates how they hog the sidewalk and cant be negotiated with.
Disabled people are not your fucking pawns, techbro.
You don’t actually care about that.
Disabled people are not your fucking pawns
I didn’t intend for it to sound like that, and reading my comment again I see that I should have expanded on it further. I’m hoping my posting history can show where I stand on issues like this.
What I should have said was that delivery services can be helpful for the elderly or those with disabilities, and that legislation on delivery services can help us improve access to those without the harms of these current robots.
For what it’s worth, we don’t have these robots where I am, so I didn’t know how bad it was. In person, I’ve only seen a few that were sitting around our university plaza last fall. I looked online, and it looks like we don’t currently have any here. I will keep what you’ve mentioned in mind when talking about these bots moving forward, especially if our local politicians are going to be deciding on them in the near future.
To expand on where my thinking was coming from, I have read first person accounts from people who can’t leave their homes easily, and also how existing delivery programs are helpful but don’t have the capacity to meet everyone that needs it: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/seniors-grocery-app-delivery-anjel-vancouver-1.4938035
Often with these discussions, automation is brought up as a way to bridge the gaps that current public funding can’t fulfill.
I also recently read about how some cities have a thriving bike/scooter sharing program, while others are suffering from mismanagement, excessive prices, and chaos; and how it came down to whether the programs were started as a public project or if they were led by tech companies. So in my earlier comment, I was tying information to this story and saying that regulated and/or publicly managed delivery options might be a better thing to focus energy on
How fucking hard
It costs once cent, can’t be done, too costly, line must go up.
Watching the robot cheerfully veer into the glass panel like a drunk on a lawn mower absolutely sent me. My sides.
Just watched the video. It’s hilarious that it breaks the glass, pauses for a few awkward moments, bats its eyes, backs up, then just sits there batting its eyes.
The crashes also come just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced it was integrating a new mapping system trained on “Pokémon Go” data which is designed to improve navigation accuracy.
Oh, great, so Nintendo is logging where its players are traveling and selling that data?
Niantic. And always have been
I’m surprised how many people didn’t realise this. I used to play Ingress, which was also from Niantic and similar to Pokémon Go but involved agents and hacking POIs rather than Pokémon trainers and Poké Stops.
Niantic discussed at the time that this was to support their work on the N+1 navigation problem, although I can’t for the life of me find a quoatable reference for this. I played Ingress knowing that my location data was being harvested thinking it was to solve a problem.
I also wonder how many people realise Niantic Labs was started as a Google internal startup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic%2C_Inc.
I joined Ingress during the closed beta, and technically still play, incredibly rarely. Before they started monetizing it with boosts and extra item storage and stuff, it was a really cool, unique game. Meet up with other players of both factions and either blanket the town and spend a couple hours hacking every portal high enough level to give good gear, or battle live for control of real locations. I once fought off a couple by myself, the three of us frantically running around a playground/park for like 90 minutes. Good fun, good exercise too.
When PGO was released, and the swarm of new players to effectively the same game (same backend, same locations, just a different visual and Pokémon instead of Portals and Lore) lots of places got bitchy about people coming around and not buying stuff, getting very Karen about the situation. Pair that with the desire to cash in on both games, and then tightening the requirements and restrictions for android (for a long time, I couldn’t play because I was running GrapheneOS).
I still fire it up when I think about it and have some time, but I haven’t been to a meet-up in over a decade, even longer for an official event. I’m still level 8, so I can interact with all items afaik, but my stats are basically a time capsule of a time forgotten.
The levels go up to 16 now.
Yeah but as far as I know no items (resonators, busters, power cubes…) go higher than 8
That’s kind of the point of those AR games. It’s been obvious from the beginning.
This is a surprise to no one, assuming you have been paying attention.
I went to a craft show on a college campus a few weeks ago. The delivery bots kept getting routed right through the middle of the thing. They were constantly hitting the vendor’s tables and knocking their products off to the ground. One even got tangled in a table cloth and pulled the entire table over. The vendors were not happy.
Why is the glass so fragile ? I’m sure they used to have a bottom metal frame
I would’ve assumed it would be made from plexiglass.
So you’re saying we can sabotage the robots and improve public transit infrastructure at the same time?
They will remove bus sheltors then is the only solution
this was a bit ago but was kinda funny.
Then run on alcohol.
A pair of glasses maybe?
ok I would never use one and think it’s a horrible addition to the world (unless economic stability was achieved for the average citizen and a form of UBI was implemented with all social safety nets securely codified into laws), but…
if something delivering my food showed up covered in broken glass and was all banged up I would have to wonder what apocalyptic-style pixar movie did this little one have to go through to humbly get my food to me. I would take it in and clean it up before I set it on it’s way again out into the wild.
