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New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

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Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

#2

Post by heinrichf »

Website: 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)

Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

#3

Post by mattpavelle »

This 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...

Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

#5

Post by callmeed »

heinrichf wrote: post #2

Website: 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.

Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

#7

Post by zwieback »

wand3r wrote: post #4

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.

I agree - it's more like saying something like this may happen in the future so we'll put out a low-end prototype and you let your imagination do the rest. For robotic food delivery to be competitive a lot of things are still missing.

Re: New food delivery service Kiwi brings robots to UC Berkeley campus

#9

Post by plorkyeran »

mattpavelle wrote: post #3

This 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.
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