Delivery robots, on a sidewalk near you soon… or maybe not?
The authorities in San Francisco have decided to drastically slow down the city’s experiment in the use of delivery robots. European Starship and North Americans Dispatch and Marble had been carrying out minimal trials with a range of various products since last year, when I first wrote about it, are were to be joined by more traditional players, such as Domino’s Pizza.
After setting a limit of nine robots for the entire city, each of the three companies will be allowed a maximum of three robots, and will only be allowed to operate in certain industrial areas with little pedestrian traffic (which pretty much rules out home delivery). The robots will be allowed a maximum speed of five kilometers an hour (they can managed 6.5 kph), and they must be supervised. City Hall says the measures are to protect the elderly, children and the disabled, although over the last year of trials no accident have been reported with pedestrians, and the robots were non-invasive in their use of urban space. The city authorities have also banned the use of Segways and bicycles on sidewalks for the same reason, this time of course due to clumsy, thoughtless humans, not attractive and well-behaved robots with specially designed algorithms to make them respectful of public spaces and humans.
The restrictions imposed by San Francisco mean that robot delivery trials will now continue in other towns in the Bay Area such as Redwood City, San Carlos, Sunnyvale or Concord, which have approved several robot deployment programs, as have states such as Florida, Idaho, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. These types of delivery companies have proved popular with venture capitalists, who have injected significant amounts of money into their development, which suggests that we will soon see these types of robots on our sidewalks. Which cities are likely to welcome robot couriers? Which cities will resist, and why? After all, most of the people who have crossed paths with this delivery robots say they were “extremely kind and respectful”, undoubtedly more than many actual people we can find in the street. What kind of relationships will we have with these new occupants of our sidewalks and after our initial curiosity, what can we expect from this new coexistence between people and robots?
(En español, aquí)
