Ford’s Vision for Package Delivery Is a Robot that Folds Up Into the Back a Self-Driving Car
May 23rd, 2019Ford conveniently doesn’t show you the robot retrieving the package from the vehicle. As a former FedEx driver who worked with delivery trucks piled top to bottom with packages for years, I chortle deeply and satisfyingly at this one.
Assume that the self driving issue is somehow sorted out, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon, take a look inside the cargo area of a delivery vehicle the next time you see one. It’s a mess. Unless you have some sort of sci-fi grade humanoid robot picking through that, forget it.
Ford might be able to mitigate this piles-of-boxes problem by loading a small number of packages into some sort of magazine which would push out each package to the end of the cargo area so the robot could pick it up. The packages would have to be loaded in delivery order; the box for the first stop would be the first to emerge from the magazine, and so on.
Woops, nobody home/can’t make the delivery. Now what?
The people at Ford are going to be stroking their beards for a while on this one.
Of course, FedEx knows all this—they have been pathologically observing and quantifying their operations for decades.
Vehicle cargo area = Too hard.
I think that’s why they’re looking at sending out a larger number of smaller bots.
But how many bots will they be sending out? One normal truck might have many dozens of packages on board.
Also, there’s a lot of difficult weirdness awaiting robots between the vehicle and the actual point of delivery. Again, you can safely assume that this won’t be viable anytime soon. My guess is that you’ll be getting rides in Musk’s robotaxis before a robot delivers your Amazon order.
I’d like to see one of these bots tuck the box under one arm, open a gate with the other, make the delivery and then kick an attacking German Shepherd in the head during the return trip to the vehicle.
Oh… The neighborhood kids will just LOVE these bots!
What about pizza delivery? Remember the pizza delivery bots? This was three years ago:
What became of this? How many pizzas are being delivered by robots now?
Any?
I think that the best thing about the Rise of the Machines will be the Comedy Gold the results along the way.
Via: The Verge:
The first time you see a strange robot walking down your street, it might be delivering a parcel. That’s the future envisioned by Ford in a new research project that explores how robots and self-driving cars could work together to deliver groceries, fast food, and more.
The robot in question is called Digit, and it stands just over five feet tall. It has a pair of skeletal legs, two arms ending in shapeless nubs, and a sensor array where its head should be. It’s the creation of startup Agility Robotics, which has been developing bipedal robots since 2015 when the company was spun out of research from Oregon State University.
In Ford’s imagining, Digit would be bundled into the back of a self-driving car. When the car reaches its destination, the trunk pops open, and Digit unfolds itself in a manner unnervingly similar to the droid army in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
The robot can then complete the last crucial step of the delivery: actually picking up the parcel and dropping it on your doorstep. No humans required.
