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Delivery robots keep crashing into bus shelters (www.popsci.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 79 points 7 months ago (10 children)

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.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago* (7 children)

    ($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

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    Flip your local bots. Or harvest them for parts aand free snacks, if youre extra cool.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    These bots can be helpful for the elderly or those with disabilities. It's probably more effective to legislate them at the municipal level.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    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

    https://bikehub.ca/about-us/news/bike-share-dilemma-why-metro-vancouver-needs-regional-bike-share-system

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