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Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

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Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#291

Post by agumonkey »

numpad0 wrote: post #280
agumonkey wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why they don't parametrize momentum with certainty. In any confusing situation, go into ultra slow environment scanning and when confidence increases, allow for a bit more.. rinse / repeat.

That's how to get a robot half feet into a choke point, immediately get stuck for half an hour surrounded by walls and confused people, until developer on an emergency Slack call along facility managers and company CTO verifies and communicates a likely-safe state of robot and surrounding equipment to field operators and a go is given to pull the thing out of the elevator.

wouldn't people prefer choking robots rather than overly confident and bumping ones ?

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#292

Post by outworlder »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #281
erulabs wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla does exactly this and it gives rise to the phantom breaking problem. Still seems like a good solution for a small bot with no passengers

No? There are numerous clips where Telsas in "full self driving" mode pull the equivalent maneuver of a teenager going "OH SHIT I WANT TO GO THERE" and veering very violently. The phantom braking problem is likely just one of the many symptoms of Musk's insistence on relying on optical systems instead of more expensive sensors.

> The phantom braking problem is likely just one of the many symptoms of Musk's insistence on relying on optical systems instead of more expensive sensors.

Based on what? How would 'expensive' sensors help?

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#293

Post by jimmaswell »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #223
jimmaswell wrote: post #199

It'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.

The food delivery robots don't look that awesome, in fact they look really shitty compared to their human counterparts. E-scooters are good at what they do at least, but they can also be a major pain in the ass, as we can see here where they are discarded carelessly because parking them is evidently not the techbros' problem. It's awesome that technological progress is made, but that doesn't mean everything with a ci…

> discarded carelessly because parking them is evidently not the techbros' problem

You can't expect the scooter companies to spend 5-10 years partnering with the city and funding parking stations on every block before launching. This is historically how these things have to happen - thing comes out, has growing pains as it interacts with the public space, public space accommodates it. Cars came before traffic lights, bicycles came before bicycle lanes, electric power came before NYC's underground infrastructure, and I think it would be appropriate for cities to accommodate these kind of rental scooters and robot deliveries. People using these things will cause pressure for the city to accommodate faster than the infeasible top-down approach of having everything in place beforehand.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#294

Post by outworlder »

vorpalhex wrote: post #206
reaperducer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when I came close it stopped, as they do when sensing an object in front of them The security robots at one of the big skyscrapers down the street from me do not stop for people. My wife got knocked into by one when we were standing in the plaza looking up something on her phone. (They're not little delivery robots. They're about five feet tall.) Good thing she was confused by what happened, because she's also the ty…

And shoving it into traffic - or at least calling the police and pressing charges - would have been the right thing to do! If you want to use robots, fine. You are still responsible for them and any people they bowl over!

> shoving it into traffic

Right, let's cause a full blown accident because a robot bumped into me.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#295

Post by mywittyname »

rtlfe wrote: post #240
Kaze404 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. Though I guess space is a big factor in that, now that I think about it.

> I would be glad to not see scooters as the enemy if they weren't so dangerous for everyone involved. There's absolutely no comparison between the dangers of scooters and cars. Every person who decides to use a scooter instead of driving or taking a taxi is having a huge positive effect on safety.

The thing is, cars operate on roads, while pedestrians operate, largely, on sidewalks. Roads have lights and signals to help mediate situations where pedestrians and cars need to use the same stretch of road. Pedestrians only really need to worry about cars at crosswalks, and even then, the most dangerous situations are cars making left turns (who can't see the cross walk in use).

Scooters are vehicles and should operate along side cars. The reason scooter rides don't drive one the roads with cars? Because it fucking dangerous. They want safety, and they want it at the expense of the safety of others.

A scooter on the road is a net gain to safety. But a scooter on a sidewalk is a net loss.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#296

Post by dublinben »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #44
_fullpint wrote: post #13

Absolutely 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 a…

The thing is there's no designated place to park them. You can't put them on the property line next to the sidewalk. Many sidewalks don't have a "planter" or other non-walking area. Sidewalks weren't designed for this. I think we should ban sidewalk scooter parking. The public right of way is not a parking lot for private companies. As an aside: many (most?) people who need sidewalks choose to use the road instead be…

>The public right of way is not a parking lot for private companies.

Yet we often dedicate 50% of our roadway for the storage of private automobiles, and this is okay?

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#297

Post by outworlder »

lnsru wrote: post #254
1over137 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are scooters more dangerous than cars? No. But you've internalized the 1.4 million yearly global deaths from car crashes as "normal".

Yes they are. Cars are separated from pedestrians. Scooters and e-bikes aren’t. There is always some jerk with scooter trying to push through the cyclists on the bike lane or show his driving skills between pedestrians when I go to the office.

> Cars are separated from pedestrians.

Not everywhere. And usually, not by much.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#298

Post by mywittyname »

thepasswordis wrote: post #214
gwbas1c wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don’t you take 2 minutes Wow, if a 3-4 minute walk involves 10 scooters that's now almost a 25-minute walk. It's not the OP's job to clean up after everyone else.

It doesn’t take 2 minutes to move a scooter 3 feet. It takes about 10 seconds.

It doesn't take very long for me to pick up litter on my walks. But I still will wish people would stop fucking littering.

Re: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

#300

Post by gzer0 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #281
erulabs wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla does exactly this and it gives rise to the phantom breaking problem. Still seems like a good solution for a small bot with no passengers

No? There are numerous clips where Telsas in "full self driving" mode pull the equivalent maneuver of a teenager going "OH SHIT I WANT TO GO THERE" and veering very violently. The phantom braking problem is likely just one of the many symptoms of Musk's insistence on relying on optical systems instead of more expensive sensors.

Expense was part of the equation initially, however, through economies of scale, we eventually would have been able to reach a feasible price point. Cost has nothing to do with why Tesla is pursuing an optical-only system.

To get rid of the dependency on the radar sensor for autopilot, we generated over 10 billion labels across two and a half million clips. To do this we had to scale our offline neural networks and our simulation engine across 1000s of GPUs, and just a little bit shy of 20,000 CPU cores. We also included over 2000 actual autopilot full self driving computers in the loop with our simulation engine. And that's the smallest compute cluster.

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