The pandemic is bringing us closer to our robot takeout future

When I did Domino’s Pizza delivery, some addresses were well known, and for most addresses we did not need directions because we delivered to those neighborhoods so often. So, I see what you mean. However, I think tubes would be too much maintenance. I think low-altitude package throwing from building to building would be better. Every building would have a net and a catapult/canon on it. That would not work for cooked meals but could work for some fragile items. To prevent failures from falling on people’s heads....

I re-evaluate my idea. Have wires running from building to building, and just have a motorized package holding robot slide down those wires to the right building.

I haven't done the math but my guess would be the maintenance costs would be pretty high over time and as energy costs drop, drones could be feasible.

Seems like a hard business proposition. Huge infrastructure investment upfront, heavy maintenance needed, you get a very inflexible system, etc. Not to mention, what happens when Amazon uses 99% of the capacity and you can’t get your package through?

It’s hard to beat trucks and minimum wage drivers (and everyone’s hoping that the “driver” part of the equation will be removed sooner rather than later)

If we’re going super future, drones seem more plausible.

> I've often wondered where the point is where vacuum-tube delivery to individual apartment buildings becomes cheaper?

If you're including everything into the factoring: never.

> For places like Manhattan, it's just hard for me to imagine that over a decade, it wouldn't be cheaper to build and use a system like that

Allocation calculations never actually function that way. Your premise can only exist in a vacuum where humans and governments and corporations don't exist, only robots. There's no omnipotent creature that can forcibly pull the unit capital away from the army of tens of thousands of deliveries and centralize it to the tube system instead. It won't self-organize because the cost calculations for traditional deliveries are individualized (I pay $5 for my pizza or sandwich delivery; not $50,000 in personal taxes for a hopeful tube system I'll never get my money back out of in my lifetime), whereas to pay for the super tube system you have to slam everyone (have to spread it out to everyone) with a massive on-going cost until it's finished (which none of them will want to pay), for services maybe they'll use in the future (it'll take multiple generations to justify the cost, which you won't be able to convince individual taxpayers to fund when there is an existing functional system that is 85% good enough).

The cost requires an extreme centralized outlay of capital, which nobody can raise given the other factors; nobody can get the building done, and nobody can get through the zoning and regulations, and nobody can spare the 10x time requirement (10x worse than it should be, as all construction is these days) to get through all of it.

It requires a nationalized step-in by some large government authority. They have to simultaneously outlaw the old system (or hyper tax it to death, same thing in effect), while drilling people on taxes to supposedly build the new system (which will take forever, go drastically over-budget, and underwhelm for the value vs cost in the end).

1.6 million people live in Manhattan. Do the math for just 500,000 * $50,000 = $25 billion. That $25b figure is likely on the low side by anywhere from 2x to 4x minimum, if you attempted to tear up all of Manhattan to do it. The cost would be staggering, and then it would take decades to reach completion.

Nobody is signing up for those taxes so they can get their pizza or Amazon delivery via a tube instead.

New York and some other cities had such a thing over a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

There is an excellent short sci-fi film exploring this concept by a former technical director at Pixar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv30ExfoKcc

larger mail boxes with arrival notification on your phone would serve the same function with much smaller investments.

I often wonder about food as a provided utility in some future. Interesting idea to deliver by tube.

Why bother installing all the infrastructure? "Move fast and break things" with ballistic delivery! There's usually something close to a parabolic arc that will get where it needs to... Of course things (like pizza) that don't deal well with being crushed into cylinders at high acceleration (and jerk) probably won't do well in either. But canned liquids should do it justice.

Lot's of impact absorbing material to carted off as trash though so not really eco friendly.

My co-op in midtown has an old US postal pneumatic system.

New York already has an underground steam system. They're constantly digging that up for maintenance. While they're in there maybe this could be installed.

There was a movie where no one leaves the house and everything was delivered by pipes. The kitchen had pipes for everything: milk pipes, syrup pipes, etc. And outside the house was just a big dark infrastructure filled with pipes.

I can't recall the name... (It's not "Meet the Applegates" but I think it might have come out around the same time. Had a real "Brazil" feeling to it. Might have been British.)

vacuum tube delivery might just deliver covid at high velocity everywhere.

I propose electronic delivery methods, maybe DSL + 3d food/widget/organ printers. The printers would require anti-virus software.

Yes but these rovers are quite slow.

It makes a lot of sense in Milton Keynes. Unfortunately that kind of design makes it an incredibly boring place to live, but there are some benefits.

There was a startup in Berkeley called Kiwibots pretty much did the same thing. The concept seemed promising at first glance, yet I always thought they were too small. I feel like if they made them cooler sized, and had them go on routes like an ice cream truck it would prove to be a better business model than a bunch of tiny robots going to an fro to deliver a bag of chips.

They temporarily laid off just the low-level operators, think of them as call centre staff or Uber drivers. These are the people who when a robot gets stuck help them cross a street or navigate around an obstacle. Think of them as support side of the business. The only reason being because US universities are on hold because of the coronavirus.

The new product development, software and hardware side is still thriving.

Here's the English version: https://news.err.ee/1070009/starship-technologies-makes-redu...

I live in Tallinn, but haven't once seen a Starship bot, guess I'm in an area not covered yet (Sikupilli).

Actually no, Starship is like 99% autonomous and self-driving, and just a few % of special cases are handled manually by the operators.

This is a really clear example of the "automation isn't replacing, it's augmenting" trend that is just going to continue to grow.

I think this is what we're going to see in more and more sectors: automation making it so that there is a 3x to 10x increase in productivity by making a few people hyper-productive.

depends on the value of your time.

Introducing them initially as being for caregivers and the vulnerable could cement the idea that they are not be messed with.

Now is a good time for that kind of social engineering: put an NHS logo on them, for example, and have the robots initially doing food delivery for shielded households.

In the long run: 1 in N robots could contain a dye pack, as a deterrent to robot capture and theft of contents.

I guess pepper spray wouldn't be allowed

We have those kinds of people in the UK too, unfortunately.

These robots are GPS tracked, not to mention lockable and remotely deactivable. All you looted was some plastic, useless cameras, circuit boards, and mini wheels as well as a GPS tracker. Break it open and you'll find $25 worth of food inside.

How is the risk/reward worth it?

Could there not be a tie-in with law enforcement as a deterrent? Unlike electric scooters, a delivery drone has a known route it is following (and no one is picking it up to be recharged), the moment it is disturbed/picked up a nearby police officer can be notified.

Also perhaps it could use pepper spray or be equipped with a paint charge to mark the attackers, could possess a sonic weapon... or maybe it can have a self-defeat routine that essentially destroys its contents/electronics to make it useless.

As with most deterrents, the most sophisticated attackers will be able to get around them. It's just that inflection point where it becomes a problem economically, that probably can be overcome.

there are plenty of stealable electric scooters on the streets already.

I've been hearing from my local shops, too, that they do not like DoorDash or GrubHub. Apparently it makes restaurants look bad? And I guess they skim too much off the top? I've definitely been asked to do take out or use the company's delivery service when possible.

I guess Chick-Fil-A took notice of that, too.

If you can, I would call the local shops you're ordering from and see if they would rather you do delivery with them, too, especially if it's a really local shop, not something a town over.

Not too surprising from the company that deploys kubernetes to every local restaurant. :) https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...

Their own equipment engineering is also impressive, based on a high school classmate’s work there in Atlanta.

This is pretty common. Many jet engines (on airplanes) are sold as a service nowadays. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/12530

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent a man a fishing rod, and you make him a slave to you forever.

> Most folks live in an apartment building.

Source?

Delivery to street isn't complicated and is straight forward to being secure.

Drone tells you it has arrived and then in the app there's an unlock button in the app.

Drone arrives & calls where you're asked to press 1.

Drone arrives & SMS where replying would achieve the same.

Drone arrives and connecting Bluetooth via the app would unlock.

It's 2020, KISS mentality. Assumption: Why do us in software development have a tenancy to over engineer.

The drone has a barcode or order number display, and like Uber Eats and friends, the restaurant has an order code. The restaurant checks the drone to see what order it expects, and either hits a button to say it’s not ready yet or loads the order in and it’s done. They could theoretically have cheap touch screen tablets in them. That said, I figure they will have human supervision for the foreseeable future, at least a decade. They would basically need to be disposable for robots to make deliveries completely unsupervised. Which in turn means you could just have a human voice on a speaker, watching the robot and interacting, or you could station such humans at the restaurants themselves, to service the bots etc. for use in a known-safe, well-mapped delivery area.

I would rather see my food coming directly from the kitchen to me, than seeing it orbiting around every customer breathing zone first!

Doesn’t make much sense to put steaming steaks on a conveyor... A lot of places use tablet menu/ordering with pictures these days. Like a supermarket grocery ad but you can tap to add to your order and send it. That with a robotic delivery could be a future.

Don't worry - in the post-crash automated economy of the future no human will ever have an entire twenty dollar bill to break.

I feel like this whole thing will also make cash payments extinct as that requires touching dirty bills. I even think the credit machines will become tap only so you don’t have to touch dirty machines used by thousands of others and enter PIN numbers.

I don't know about the US, but there's a major push to move to electronic payments around the EU. Bank accounts are free, terminals are dirt cheap, even the poorest get contactless cards.

Not to mention that cash+coin machines that can also give change have been around and reliable for a while now. But having autonomous cash-filled robots around is just inviting trouble.