I hate to be negative; so I won't. I can't see this being scaleable, profitable or useful at a meaningfully higher level than people.
And imagine if it did scale. What an eyesore that would be. Would we count them in the census?
New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#12Wow - that site is terrible. On initial load I have 3 ads (left side, right side and bottom) that take up 10% of screen each, cover the content and other ads, and scroll with me. http://imgur.com/a/TKJNC
I definitely recommend uBlock Origin - https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#13How do they plan on dealing with vandalism and theft? Those robots look pretty defenseless.
Other than the video camera that's presumably recording everything around them and the real-time location reporting? If you just want to damage it you can chuck a brick at it from its blind spot, but that's true of everything.
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#14I hate to be so negative but this looks terrible. I remember seeing that other food delivery within San Francisco that uses a robot but at least it looks like there was real engineering put into it.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/marble-and-yelp-eat24-star...
This is just a glorified rc car with a basket on top being controlled by outsourced workers. Not even a MVP prototype imo.
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#15This is interesting, but these robots move slowly - or at least not as fast as a car. I don't see food from outside a mile or 2 km range being deliverable in any reasonable amount of time. Is this the food-delivery equivalent of the last mile (kilometer) problem? Because with delivery the rest of the miles are also important...
I live in Berkeley in one of the areas that they're testing these and there's 20+ restaurants that do take-out within a mile of me, so that part isn't a big issue. Even a mile could be a 30 minute round trip though, as they run on sidewalks and so inherently can't really go much faster than walking speed, and that's not very many deliveries per hour per robot.
I think Yelp/Eat24 is also testing the Marble (https://www.marble.io/) robots downtown.
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#16Website: http://www.kiwicampus.com/home From https://angel.co/kiwicampus : "Current self driving algorithms require huge amounts of data to be trained with, so our robots are initially being controlled from Colombia." (not affiliated, I just found these DIY-like robots very fun)
You'd be surprised how many "AI-powered" startups are actually powered by BPOs located in Columbia/Philippines/India/etc.
Reminds me of x.ai. Didn't it turn out that the "AI assistant" is actually made of humans?
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#17I almost tripped over one of these last week! Then I stared at it as it rolled away, wondering if they were being remote controlled or had some basic AI and pathfinding. Sounds like a little of both.
I think it's a great start, but the clearly have a lot of work to do. They should start by adding a pole and flag so you can see it coming. :)
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#18How do they plan on dealing with vandalism and theft? Those robots look pretty defenseless.
I wondered the same. I was actually shocked to see one on the street with it's camera still attached, moving unmolested past a bunch of people.
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#19Wow - that site is terrible. On initial load I have 3 ads (left side, right side and bottom) that take up 10% of screen each, cover the content and other ads, and scroll with me. http://imgur.com/a/TKJNC
That was my first response as well, encouraged me to reenable uBlock.
Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus
#20Redwood City has Starship Technologies robots doing Doordash deliveries in the downtown area. Those look more like a finished product. They're mostly autonomous but can be controlled over a cell phone link if necessary.