
Gita – autonomous lightweight delivery system - systemfreund
http://gita.piaggiofastforward.com/
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Animats
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.

[1] [https://www.starship.xyz/](https://www.starship.xyz/) [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc)

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buzzybee
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](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.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npEkbCmE31Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npEkbCmE31Y)

~~~
wcarss
odd sighting: your first youtube link has a brief cameo of the scream mask in
the stock footage of delivery trucks:
[https://youtu.be/1GpaAF3_lKA?t=31](https://youtu.be/1GpaAF3_lKA?t=31)

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tomlong
I thought this was going to be git based CI software..

~~~
tomcam
A boy can dream, can't he?

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paulddraper
I have been dreaming about this for a long time...I'm gonna make it someday.

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sneak
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.

~~~
mncharity
Have you seen Sand Flea jumping onto building roofs?
[http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html](http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_sandflea.html)

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..._

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crooked-v
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.

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lowglow
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.

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trome
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.

~~~
lowglow
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.

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amelius
Looks like an automated suitcase trolley.

It could be handy, except ... you probably can't take it on the bus/train or
put it in a car or take it on an airplane.

~~~
amelius
Also, it could be used by bad guys as a very dangerous delivery mechanism.

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erikpukinskis
That horse left the barn a long time ago. You can strap some c4 to a drone
very easily. You could do the same with an RC car cheaply 30 years ago.

We aren't safe because it's difficult to hurt someone. We're safe because we
keep an eye on the people who would do us harm.

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bigiain
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...)

~~~
erikpukinskis
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".

~~~
bigiain
"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...)

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erikpukinskis
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.

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Untit1ed
Cool how similar it looks to the WW2 Kugelpanzer:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelpanzer)

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2pointsomone
What's with the name Gita? You know it is the name of the holy book of Hindus,
right? Then again, there is the infamous tech book series "Bible".

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riffraff
it's italian for "trip" (or school trip, or field trip), the mother company
here is Piaggio which is an italian manufacturer.

~~~
scotu
to complete since it's internationally know better then Piaggio's name, the
Vespa scooter is produced by Piaggio

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obilgic
I haven't seen such a useless 'take a look' video

edit: second video

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johnnydoe9
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.

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jelliclesfarm
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..

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foota
Did anyone else that watched the video feel extremely uncomfortable with the
comparison of a sherpa to a robot?

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tomcam
Affirmative

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ragebol
What I like mostly is that more and more companies are feeling confident
enough to put more-or-less autonomous robots in real-world environments.

That's different from the military using drones, which are highly trained
operators with robots in the air, which is a lot less cluttered.

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aiNohY6g
Looks _a lot_ like TwinswHeel, which was just presented at the CES.
[http://twinswheel.fr/](http://twinswheel.fr/)

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unboxed_type
Is it legal to use such robots in human-populated environments like office
building or factory? What if it causes harm to somebody? Any thoughts?

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joakleaf
Sounds a lot like the robot from Starship Technologies;

[https://www.starship.xyz](https://www.starship.xyz)

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Nzen
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...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAynoPCMT5etFQp_hJB4DGQ/videos)

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fiatjaf
Are you serious? An autonomous robot that can walk alone in the streets and
carry a lot of stuff inside?

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icebraining
Seems like it's not really designed for walking alone in the streets. All the
autonomous operations are portrayed indoors.

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riffraff
the text says that in environments it knows it can travel by itself, and
handle obstaclers and stuff.

AIU the operational concept should be: show the thing one route once and it
will be able to retrace it.

