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.
Then run on alcohol.
Has anyone ever pinned one of these down and pooped in one?
Not yet
There’s a kid’s book called Positive Ninja where the advice is to reframe situations using the word yet. As in, I haven’t been successful in accomplishing this yet. With this kind of positive thinking going around, those robots better have a care. 😉
I haven’t been able to catch one yet, but God as my witness I will find one and when I do, I will fill it to the brim with my butt chowder.
I went to a craft show on a college campus a few weeks ago. The delivery bots kept getting routed right through the middle of the thing. They were constantly hitting the vendor’s tables and knocking their products off to the ground. One even got tangled in a table cloth and pulled the entire table over. The vendors were not happy.
this was a bit ago but was kinda funny.
What’s crazy is, bus stops, and their associated shelters DO NOT MOVE. So there’s no need to even detect them if you just code the things properly. The GPS is accurate enough to avoid them entirely using proper mapping. This particular problem should NOT be happening at all, no matter how poor the detection equipment or algorithms are.
LiDAR mostly uses infrared light, guess what’s NOT invisible to infrared? Glass. Or just take off the infrared filters from the cameras…
What’s crazy is, bus stops, and their associated shelters DO NOT MOVE.
TIL
Someone tell Metro Transit. They make changes to my local bus route every few weeks and it’s annoying.
They’re doing it to mess with the delivery robots who would have a perfect record if not for the bus stops being placed in their path constantly.
They get to abuse public infrastructure to build their stupid little robots tax free, and we get to pay for the repairs with our tax dollars.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
Require them to fix AND pay a fine, or let the city fix it and pay 4x the cost AND still pay the fine. Shit will stop happening quick.
Nah the second option. You know they’d fix it shitty.
They never let a private citizen repair public infrastructure that they broke, I’m pretty sure paying to fix it means the company is paying the city or transit authority to do the repairs.
“Fixing” something means it has to pass inspection. You can slap shit in with duct tape but you’re gonna be out what you paid plus the 4x because your fix was sub par.
Seems they’re covering it for now, but it’s anyone’s guess how long the conscientious PR approach will last.
Hansen adds that the company quickly dispatched a team to retrieve the robot and clean up the area. Coco has also launched an internal investigation to determine what caused the robot’s error. In the meantime, it says it’s taking responsibility for the cost of repairing the wrecked shelter.
As sad as it is, it’s rather nice to see a tech company actually take responsibility and not try to weasel out.
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.
How fucking hard
It costs once cent, can’t be done, too costly, line must go up.
($2 * number of robots * labor cost to install one * labor cost to update and integrate) > (cost of settling potential lawsuit)
publicly traded companies are actually super predictable
Flip your local bots. Or harvest them for parts aand free snacks, if youre extra cool.
Heroes.
That 2$ is subject to cost cutting
Good point. I wonder what will happen when those robots drive towards a mirror.
Yeah, they’re a bit territorial, so that would be something to see!
They will remove bus sheltors then is the only solution
Watching the robot cheerfully veer into the glass panel like a drunk on a lawn mower absolutely sent me. My sides.
Just watched the video. It’s hilarious that it breaks the glass, pauses for a few awkward moments, bats its eyes, backs up, then just sits there batting its eyes.
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This will be the corporate response.
“Only poors use transit, anyway! In fact, ban pedestrians because they might confuse our delivery robot! Sidewalks should be renamed Delivery Bot Lanes.”
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Does it mean pokémon go players also routinely crash into bus stops?
I have no doubt the training data includes drunk players, so yes!
And kids on heelies swerving all over.
A pair of glasses maybe?
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.
Oh, great, so Nintendo is logging where its players are traveling and selling that data?
Niantic. And always have been
I’m surprised how many people didn’t realise this. I used to play Ingress, which was also from Niantic and similar to Pokémon Go but involved agents and hacking POIs rather than Pokémon trainers and Poké Stops.
Niantic discussed at the time that this was to support their work on the N+1 navigation problem, although I can’t for the life of me find a quoatable reference for this. I played Ingress knowing that my location data was being harvested thinking it was to solve a problem.
I also wonder how many people realise Niantic Labs was started as a Google internal startup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic%2C_Inc.
I joined Ingress during the closed beta, and technically still play, incredibly rarely. Before they started monetizing it with boosts and extra item storage and stuff, it was a really cool, unique game. Meet up with other players of both factions and either blanket the town and spend a couple hours hacking every portal high enough level to give good gear, or battle live for control of real locations. I once fought off a couple by myself, the three of us frantically running around a playground/park for like 90 minutes. Good fun, good exercise too.
When PGO was released, and the swarm of new players to effectively the same game (same backend, same locations, just a different visual and Pokémon instead of Portals and Lore) lots of places got bitchy about people coming around and not buying stuff, getting very Karen about the situation. Pair that with the desire to cash in on both games, and then tightening the requirements and restrictions for android (for a long time, I couldn’t play because I was running GrapheneOS).
I still fire it up when I think about it and have some time, but I haven’t been to a meet-up in over a decade, even longer for an official event. I’m still level 8, so I can interact with all items afaik, but my stats are basically a time capsule of a time forgotten.
The levels go up to 16 now.
Yeah but as far as I know no items (resonators, busters, power cubes…) go higher than 8
They have a third data farm in Pikmin Bloom. Wait, does Pikmin Bloom still exist? I did that for a couple months and lost interest.
That’s kind of the point of those AR games. It’s been obvious from the beginning.
This is a surprise to no one, assuming you have been paying attention.
My sibling in Talos, did you really think these AR games weren’t going to include tracking user movements when the ENTIRE POINT of the game is to be in specific places and they go out of their way to make sure people aren’t spoofing gps?
If a AAA game is free-to-play, then you are the product and your data is being sold.
THEN they NEED to have ultrasonic sensors, activated at … say … 1/2-metre intervals, because LIDAR may be blind to float-glass that isn’t at a right-angle to it, but SONAR isn’t blind to sheet-glass.
_ /\ _
( the things might harm the hearing of animals, hence the limiting it to a chirp-every-1/2-metre idea: minimize noise-pollution that we are “blind” to, see? )
Why is the glass so fragile ? I’m sure they used to have a bottom metal frame
I would’ve assumed it would be made from plexiglass.
It’s tempered glass, so it doesn’t need the support. It also means that it’s designed to shatter in a way that prevents sharp edges. That robot has a lot more power than a human when it hits the glass. Tempered glass does weaken after repeated strong impacts, so that could potentially be part of it as well.
Does the robot have any sharp bits? Tempered glass doesn’t require much force if using, say, a broken bit of spark plug.
It’s not like shattered bus shelters were a huge epidemic before this so it seems like the city already found a good balance between cost and safety.
