Starship 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.
I get the impression that Starship is doing test deployments in many different cities. The videos are probably indeed intended as press pushes, but they make a lot of them, they try a lot of different locations and conditions, and they interview generously and with a focus towards business value, which speaks to the underlying tech being sound in principle. I would be much more concerned if they were showing the same laboratory environments over and over or focused their videos on unsubstantial claims about the tech - they don't do either of those things. Here's some more recent coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GpaAF3_lKA
And while there are some obvious limitations to wheeled bots as a door-to-door courier system, the market for "personal luggage that follows you", which is more like what Gita is trying, could also be a pretty good one, and less ridiculous looking than "luggage you ride," [0] our current incumbent for luggage innovation. Having a bot stay by you has the gratifying feeling of having a pet or perhaps a servant.
These small scales and low speeds are much more amenable to experimenting, making mistakes, and ceding control than a highway-speed automation, as well. At worst, they're toys, but toys are often a good starting point for serious stuff too. It makes for very efficient R&D.
"Golf cart that follows you" is a thing.[1] Those have been around for 10 years, and they sell modestly. Suitcases which follow you exist, but haven't caught on.
It might be useful to have a set of suitcases that would follow the user and each other like a train. That would be an amusing option for road cases for rock groups and trade shows.
For 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.
People 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.
I haven't thought through the economics on these systems, but there are enough startups working on it for me to think it must be a larger market than I realize. I wonder what the overhead is (how many robots you need to meet demand), how quickly they can deliver, and what other limitations they have (temperature control, weather resistance, ability to traverse stairs/elevators).
At what point do these machines become cheaper than humans? I understand that they are likely meant to be a supplement as opposed to a replacement, but until they can compete with humans there's not much of a business.
Piaggio is not exactly a startup but yeah, this gita may just be some kind of proof of principle product for a marketing stunt. If not, because I see no market for it.
I 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.
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...
That 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.
At 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.
Your 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.
Well 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.
There are a lot of possible paths between those two points.[1] And the Google directions for car/transit/walk/bike all differ. So why shouldn't Google directions for a bot also be different? All you need is one viable path, and the knowledge of city conditions to find it.
That, or a lawn gnome shell with a display saying "I'll give you a cookie to walk me down this street"...
But you are folding in a lot of problems with the hand waving of "All you need is one viable path, and the knowledge of city conditions to find it."
Re: HITL/Helper has been considered, but it's not viable to assume there will be someone there in a reasonable amount of time, causing scheduling problems. Predictive models/scheduling theory is important when considering autonomous logistics and resource allocation.
There are a few cases where HITL might be needed, for instance to take over in the case of an obstacle/condition that hasn't been accounted for.
The idea is, as path constraints are relaxed, city delivery looks more like a graph-connectivity problem than a obstacle-course skills test.
"Apt 3C, ring the bell and come up" vs "1670 Market" vs "Gough and Market" vs "Gough and (two blocks away but more easily navigated) Page". Those range from ARPA-challenge hard, to perhaps plausible. "At 7:35 pm, as my bus arives" vs "7ish" vs "this evening" vs "sometime in the next few days". "During rush hour" vs "during the day" vs "whenever - text me" vs "drop it off overnight". "While I'm jogging" vs "at home/work/food" vs "here's my schedule and cell - intersect me" vs "drop it off anytime". "Regardless of weather" vs "when there's no snow" vs "on a nice day".
Delivery is always a coverage function, even for humans. "We don't deliver there, after 11, in a blizzard." "No, our delivery person won't wait on that corner for you to bike by."
Once a robot is street/sidewalk legal, perhaps it's more interesting to know where it can get to then where it can't? And to try to craft a business model around that.
Few street corners are difficult to reach at 4 am on a weekday. But is there a market for that?
And focusing on connectivity rather than robot tech, emphasizes the potential of hybrids. Maybe Ubers get extra money, and perhaps their passengers a discount, for carrying robots or their payload pods across town. Perhaps it's much technically easier, and permissible, to tailgate a city bus, than to navigate a messy street scene. Perhaps customers get pod points for commuting with other customer's pods. If some robots are simple and cheap, then utilization matters less, and perhaps it becomes plausible sit on a corner for a few hours, waiting for the customer, or for traffic to become saner before crossing. The robot that can handle hairy traffic need not be the dinky little robot that can barely do sidewalks, but is cheap enough to putter down some smooth and empty sidewalk, and sit waiting for the customer to get home.
And tactical intelligence matters. Google maps has like 10 cm resolution in SF. Enough to tell sidewalks with trees and tables, from big empty concrete "highway" sidewalks. City streets are very heterogeneous. The easiest way to navigate a difficult street, is to avoid it. Estimating what that costs in space/time/market coverage, and balancing out a business model, seems the interesting challenge.
Knowing the trash pickup schedule, and routing around those streets, may be easier than driving around trash. Knowing this block is fine for 4 inch wheels, but that block has a tree root uplifting the pavement. This block is concrete, that is poorly maintained brick. Busy vs deserted in the evening. Dog walkers and kids vs commercial and industrial. Basically just Google directions service, for variously capable bots.
> it's not viable to assume there will be someone there in a reasonable amount of time
In a city with Uber, it may well be that humans are too expensive and needed too often, but it seems less likely that they are unavailable. Modulo the previously discussed temporal constraints.
This is all just quick brainstorming, but I just was struck by the "At Asteria..." comment framing the challenge as one of robot capability in the face of intractable street problems, when it seemed the opportunity is a much richer system and market design space.
Is an IoT chinese food delivery bag, that keeps an eye on the food, so the driver can just drop it at the curb and move on, rather than waiting to interact with the customer, is that bag a delivery robot? How much of its challenge is technical vs market? What if it unclips and can creep down a sidewalk, to be more easily gathered afterwards? What if it's a box, and can creep down a good sidewalk, from main street dropoff to nearby customer? Is that cross-town robot delivery? Can robots be one-way, to be recovered manually in the wee hours, moving labor from crunch time with traffic, to night shift with clear streets? Can grocery delivery get permission to drop off IoT boxes instead of dropping into combo lock bins? Can those boxes then get permission to roll empty down night sidewalks, and cross streets, to gather for pickup? Permission to roll loaded during non-rushhour daytime? And so on.
Alternatively: "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...)
Not all surveillance is state surveillance. I pay attention when I walk around, and I talk to my neighbors.
If you think surveillance isn't necessary, my guess is you are actually living in a "safe" area and leaning heavily on state surveillance and military/police violence to provide border control so that the general public can't enter your community.
Perhaps you don't consider the person standing at the border and looking to see who's trying to come in as "surveillance".
"If you think surveillance isn't necessary, my guess is you are actually living in a "safe" area and leaning heavily on state surveillance and military/police violence to provide border control so that the general public can't enter your community."
My initial indignant reaction to that was "No way!", but realistically, my country (Australia) treats refugees worse than (assumption ahead) yours... While my neighbourhood is "safe" and pretty much abhors police violence, you're right about my country... :-/
"Perhaps you don't consider the person standing at the border and looking to see who's trying to come in as "surveillance"."
Like I said, I'm not from the US, but even some of us on the opposite side of the planet have seen all the stats proving toddlers with guns kill more people than "the people standing at your borders". From someone with no real dog in your immigration policy fight, but perhaps with a bit of outside perspective - this seems like institutionalised every day racism, rather than any real attempt to make the public safer... (Not intending to accuse you personally of racism here, but there's a deep undercurrent of it in your country's policies, government, institutions of power, and public discourse. And my country is no better either...)
For what it's worth I'm against both borders and state surveillance. I am just questioning your suggestion that somehow surveillance itself is inherently evil.
The 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.
I 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..
tl;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/vid...
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/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc