San Francisco banned delivery robots because they obstructed pedestrians, so Postmates built one with eyes, turn signals, and a mandate to yield. Serve is Postmates’ new cooler-meet-autonomous-stroller that it hopes can cut costs and speed up deliveries. The semi-autonomous rover uses cameras and LIDAR to navigate sidewalks, but always has a human pilot remotely monitoring a fleet of Serves who can take control if there’s a problem. There’s even a “Help” button, touchscreen, and video chat display customers or passers-by can use to summon assistance.
Serve will be rolling out in various cities over the next year. It does deliveries to customers that unlock its cargo hatch with their phone or a passcode, but it also can grab food from restaurants in congested areas and bring them to a Postmates dispatch hub from which delivery people can take packages the last mile. That could save Postmates money on delivery labor, but the company didn’t provide any information on how it might help transition delivery staff to other roles or careers.
“Somehow as a society we’re OK with moving a 2-pound burrito with a 2-ton car. All the energy is used to move the car, not the burrito, and there all the congestion it introduces” says Ali Kashani, VP of Postmates X special projects. So Postmates spent the last couple of years piloting autonomous rovers built by Starship and Robby before deciding only it had the on-demand experience to build the right bot.
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2RWCbZR
No comments:
Post a Comment