One Way to Keep the Sidewalk Clear: Remote-Controlled Scooter-Bots | Hacker News Reader

One Way to Keep the Sidewalk Clear: Remote-Controlled Scooter-Bots

citylab.com

16 pointscienega19 comments

When I read the title I was hoping it was a strategy to remove trash, needles, and human waste from the streets of San Francisco. But no, the only problem addressed here is keeping scooters off the sidewalk.

San Francisco problems require San Francisco solutions.

Autonomous mobile portapotties as a service.

My first take on keeping the sidewalk clear was snow, of course, and wondering how you'd get enough battery life to push any useful amount. But seeing the domain name made it obvious they didn't mean snow.

I made eye contact with a homeless person pooping again today. This has become a regular part of life in the United States.

Thank god we have a log(n) solution to the epidemic of scooters on streets. Thank you technology. I hope all the Series A investors were able to get that new electric Porsche and didn't have to settle for a Corvette like some filthy commoner.

>I made eye contact with a homeless person pooping again today. This has become a regular part of life in the United States.

It's certainly not a regular part of life in the United States. It may be (but probably isn't) a regular part of your own life in the United States.

I've made eye contact with a pooping homeless person in the United States zero times over four decades of life.

> I made eye contact with a homeless person pooping again today. This has become a regular part of life in the United States.

I think you mean "This has become a regular part of life in the city I live in." That is so outside of regular life in the vast majority of the USA that I can't comprehend seeing it once.

In what city is that an actual regular part of life?

The US has shitty public transit. Solution? Over-pice scotter scattered around the city that will never turn a profit.

The US has a shitty scooter problem. Solution? More scooters, but these has cameras, and they are self driving. They help clear the sidewalks of the other shitty solution.

The US is a chain of shitty decisions that never address real problems, but cause the next generation of problems to keep the economy running.

Hacker news should add a secondary vote button for title accuracy, or any way to validate titles.

I live in Manhattan, and I literally have never seen human waste anywhere in NYC since I've lived here. Plenty of dog poop, maybe a needle in sketchy areas. But San Francisco is another level of screwed up these days.

How long have you lived in manhattan? It's not common, but neither is it rare, to have to step over some human poop on the stairs of subway stations.

I applaud this idea, but at the same time I feel like the use cases where this will actually work are pretty limited. I doubt the scooters will be able to cross a street or navigate any kind of actual obstacles, so you're going to be limited to corralling them somewhere on the block that isn't occluded by obstacles. Also, scooters are just an awful target for autonomous movement for the same reasons they're pretty crappy to ride: high center of gravity, small solid wheels, and no real built-in self-balancing features (bikes self-balance to a reasonable degree due to having large wheels acting as gyroscopes).

If you want to get rid of humans for pickup/dropoff and charging, you'd be better off building super drones that can literally pick up scooters wherever they are and drop them on a roving flatbed for charging. Or at least put an IR strobe beacon on them so they're easier to find either by chargers or locating drones.

Using obstacles, The robots could probably be coerced into a DoS (denial of sidewalk) attack.

Not that it detracts from your point, but it’s a common myth that the gyroscopic effect from the wheels is the main reason bicycles are easy to balance. Take a look at https://ezramagazine.cornell.edu/SUMMER11/ResearchSpotlight....

This is such a laughably dismissible idea, I don't even know where to start: navigating sidewalks and crosswalks autonomously is even more difficult than autonomously navigating the roadways (what with all the standardized signals, markings, rules, etc.) and yet here we are pitching it as if we already have the technology to accomplish this to any useful degree. Is it going to locate and push the correct crosswalk button to make sure it has a chance to cross the street safely and legally? Also, what are these things going to do when drunk (or otherwise unhelpful) passerby inevitably kick them over, rendering them completely immobile? This is 100% innovation theater.

Can someone please come up with AI software that generates buzzword-mashing-up startup ideas, gathers investor capital, hires 23 year olds to work 70 hours a week, and turns around and sells it to another tech company for a few million dollars?

Another way to keep the sidewalks clear is to not allow them to begin with.

I'm sure emusk got some spare falcon 1 they could use to actually retrofit this concept onto standard scooters. /s Shall we remind ourselves the problem we started with here was to transport people? I thing i got lost at the point where sweatshop vc corps backed by surveillance hungry bigtechs flooded an unregulated market with gadgets that now litter the public space. If the form seems to look like a troll, the content is not. Here's some reference on why these are greenwashed gadgets:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab2da8/...

Or you know the people using the scooters could park them properly.

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