Estonian winter 1, delivery robots 0 | Hacker News Reader

Estonian winter 1, delivery robots 0

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103 pointscarlsborg46 comments

I want to know what they were thinking. "Alright, 10cm of snow ... send out the bots that are completely unfit for these conditions!"

While questionable considering the location, of course it's fine to not design them to work in snow. What baffles me is that they didn't design them to work in snow and sent them into the snow.

Considering that it's a lot of them in a bunch I can imagine that the bots had just started from their garage. Maybe this was some internal test?

I can't imagine somebody consciously decided to let these things go through snow and operate normally. And surely there's that amount of human oversight ...

Maybe the snow came by surprise.

There have been a lot of sudden snow lately. In the UK 50 people were stuck in a bar and I believe in Denmark people had to stay the night in IKEA.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/world/europe/england-pub-...

https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/03/shoppers-snowed-in-at-denmark...

That snow wasn't unexpected, people went to the inn fully knowing there was a high chance of being stuck there, same happens at places like the Cat and Filddle, or Kirkstone Pass

There was rapid snowfall today, but certainly not a surprise. The local media has been warning about a snowstorm for about a week. Also, most of the snowfall happened during the night, so it was almost all there by the morning.

maybe the sidewalks were plowed up till this neglected stretch (just a guess)

I was in Tallinn last September and saw a couple of these. They're pretty cute. One thing that bugged me was that when one of them crosses a street (using a pedestrian crossing), when it detects a car approaching, when it's in the middle of the crossing, it stops and goes back to the pavement it was on originally, instead of continuing to move forward, which would take either the same or even less time. What's the logic here?

It's "impossible" for such robot to have the situational awareness of a human. So probably a safeguard against it moving out on a place of the road where it isn't supposed to be.

Why? Can the robot not detect adjacent moving objects? Can it not detect how far away the other side of the street in? It sounds to me like it just needs better programming (and maybe more sensors?)

Yeah it needs better programming aka general intelligence.

Right, I agree. But I'm just challenging the notion of impossibility. It actually doesn't seem to be that complex of an issue as long as the object detection us solid ( coming from my biased perspective). Maybe challenging, but nowhere near impossible

maybe they learned from squirrels how to behave when crossing the road and a car comes

"Nature's shittiest decision makers."

Imagine having your eyes folded and isolated head-phones that told you stuff like "car on right side approaching". Better to go to a known safe place, then to hurry into the unknown.

I wonder what legal ramifications would be if you run them over while they’re on a pedestrian crossing. They probably wouldn’t count as human at least? Destruction of property?

It probably depends on the country you're in.

Not because destruction of property has a harsher punishment, but because in many car dependent countries, such as the United States, killing a person with your car has become so normalized and accepted as inevitable that there's very little investigation of it and punishment for it.

If you want to get away with murder, buy a car.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53856098-crash-course

They forgot to include a Snowbot in the convoy, rookie mistake.

https://thesnowbot.com/

Cool project. Any ideas how much it would cost?

It's listed here with a price in the range of $999-$4,999.

https://thesnowbot.com/products/snowbot-s1-snow-blower-robot

Looks like they might just need higher ground clearance and some snow tires. They're so low right now they look like they were designed for indoor use.

Yeah, looks like the underbody is beaching onto the snow. Higher wheel diameter, wider tire, and deeper treads would do the trick here.

Snow is not that bad, but what about icing? It would be a fun view with all those robots gently sliding downhill.

You mean the stuff you put on a cake?

It's a bit funny, but not really. If I pushing my daughter in a stroller, and they blocked the way like that when it's already difficult to walk in the snow I would literally kick one to the curb. I'm tired of the sidewalk being used as a dumping ground for every possible thing.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Wheelchairs, in particular, require at least a 3-foot-wide clear path, and many wheelchair users wouldn't be able to just "kick one to the curb."

It's not quite clear to me if that would be an issue on this particular sidewalk, but it does seem like an oversight in the design of such systems.

I don't mind, maybe my language was unnecessarily aggressive, and things can be funny without looking at the big picture. But overall, I have zero patience left for anything that blocks my way on the sidewalk out of sheer convenience for them. The attitude that a sidewalk can be used for whatever just because people are flexible needs to change because it's not true. Plenty examples above.

Absolutely. Sidewalks were never meant for meandering robots. At the very least we should tax those stupid things as they consume a public resource.

Any info on how they work when it's not snowing?

If delivery robots get pedestrian and cycle lanes cleared of snow faster that feels like a win-win for everyone.

Seems more like a reflection of poor priority-setting, if it takes a commercial interest being harmed before people's direct interest are respected.

How did they all end up in the same snowdrift?

I'd love to see a Minard-type chart of the delivery routes, and the counts of how many robots dropped where...

This is why I have high amount of distrust towards self-driving cars - I always feel like no one has gone and tested them on an unplowed (or even plowed) piece of road.

I don't see the relation.

This tweet is just a funny picture but I'm sure they manage just fine when the snow is removed. It's not difficult to find picture showing the same problem with normal car: http://spectrum-bend.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/article-...

Edit: another one: https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1824899.html hundreds of motorists blocked on the highway in france this week. Nothing to do with self driving car.

I think the relation is (concern about) insufficient consideration for diversity of real world environments.

Looking at those wheels, I can only assume they were designed by someone who never experiences mild snow outside their home. Someone in San Francisco or Monterey, for example. Yes, even though the company is Estonian.

I’m somewhat more trustful that self driving cars can cope with bad weather in particular, though the general principal “reality is hard” still applies: https://youtube.com/shorts/kM-xBgz26pE?feature=share

But why should self driving car be hold to higher standard than normal car?

I mean, reality is hard also for humans.

Like all these human driver stuck on the highway over night because they didn't think snow would block their car.

What if something really unexpected happen? Actually autonomous car has more likelihood to react and stop the car in time than a human driver.

>> "But why should self driving car be hold to higher standard than normal car?"

This was one of the pitches before the goalposts moved again. They were going to be better drivers than humans.

> But why should self driving car be hold to higher standard than normal car?

What I wrote shouldn’t be seen as implying that, though as @Kye writes in the other reply, the AI part of a self-driving car being better than the human in a normal car is the main selling point to date.

To use my previous link as a concrete case: while humans naturally suffer from various optical illusions, a human who mistakes a truck carrying traffic lights for a continuous stream of traffic lights in the roadway shouldn’t be allowed to take a driving test, let alone pass.

When AI perception is at a merely human level, it can react faster. Right now, it lacks the perception to know when it needs to react, so it has to be turned to balance type I and type II errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

AI cars will be great, but they aren’t yet. Are Teslas and Waymos already better on average than humans? I think so, but with low certainty and by a small margin. But in the long term, when they have learned how to see, they can indeed see more and react faster.

Exactly. When the pavement is covered in snow the cameras & image software are going to freak out.

1. Not enough contrast to determine where the lane is. Or the curb.

2. A previous car might have wheel-spun a trough down to the pavement, and now the image is reversed - all white, with black stripes.

This reminds me that I need to change my Tires!

The chilling effects of global warming.

Someone should end their misery.

There's good eatin' in em.

I guess someone in SF forgot to account for bad weather in other parts of the world

It’s actually an Estonian startup: Starship Technologies. Engineering teams are in Estonia and Finland. You’d think they are familiar with snow there. :)

“Starship Technologies is an Estonian company developing small self-driving robotic delivery vehicles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with engineering operations in Tallinn, Estonia, and a satellite team in Helsinki, Finland. Starship also has offices in London, UK, Germany, Washington, DC and Mountain View, California.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies

Well I'll be damned. Thank you for sharing

Larger wheels was a P0 that then got demoted to P2 by a SF PM.

Do they have these in SF? I thought Estonia was sort of special with these.

They have a pilot program in Mountain View. A couple of my coworkers purposely drove to a nearby park to try it out.

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