Food delivery robots are struggling to steer clear of Chicago’s bus stop shelters. Within just 48 hours, two autonomous couriers from different companies veered off course and collided with shelters shattering glass and alarming nearby residents. These pair of dramatic incidents come amidst brewing tension among community members and lawmakers in Chicago who oppose the robots’ presence. The crashes also come just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced it was integrating a new mapping system trained on “Pokémon Go” data which is designed to improve navigation accuracy.
What’s crazy is, bus stops, and their associated shelters DO NOT MOVE. So there’s no need to even detect them if you just code the things properly. The GPS is accurate enough to avoid them entirely using proper mapping. This particular problem should NOT be happening at all, no matter how poor the detection equipment or algorithms are.
THEN they NEED to have ultrasonic sensors, activated at … say … 1/2-metre intervals, because LIDAR may be blind to float-glass that isn’t at a right-angle to it, but SONAR isn’t blind to sheet-glass.
_ /\ _
( the things might harm the hearing of animals, hence the limiting it to a chirp-every-1/2-metre idea: minimize noise-pollution that we are “blind” to, see? )
Watching the robot cheerfully veer into the glass panel like a drunk on a lawn mower absolutely sent me. My sides.
I say the only next logical step is to delegalize and get rid of all those silly bus shelters
This will be the corporate response.
“Only poors use transit, anyway! In fact, ban pedestrians because they might confuse our delivery robot! Sidewalks should be renamed Delivery Bot Lanes.”
Why is the glass so fragile ? I’m sure they used to have a bottom metal frame
It’s tempered glass, so it doesn’t need the support. It also means that it’s designed to shatter in a way that prevents sharp edges. That robot has a lot more power than a human when it hits the glass. Tempered glass does weaken after repeated strong impacts, so that could potentially be part of it as well.
How fucking hard is it to put a $2 ultrasonic distance sensor on the front. I built robots when I was a kid that wouldn’t do this.
This has been solved for 50 years FFS. Yet here we are with techbros thinking cameras can solve everything.
That 2$ is subject to cost cutting
Good point. I wonder what will happen when those robots drive towards a mirror.
They get to abuse public infrastructure to build their stupid little robots tax free, and we get to pay for the repairs with our tax dollars.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
Require them to fix AND pay a fine, or let the city fix it and pay 4x the cost AND still pay the fine. Shit will stop happening quick.
Nah the second option. You know they’d fix it shitty.
Seems they’re covering it for now, but it’s anyone’s guess how long the conscientious PR approach will last.
Hansen adds that the company quickly dispatched a team to retrieve the robot and clean up the area. Coco has also launched an internal investigation to determine what caused the robot’s error. In the meantime, it says it’s taking responsibility for the cost of repairing the wrecked shelter.
Does it mean pokémon go players also routinely crash into bus stops?
I have no doubt the training data includes drunk players, so yes!
The crashes also come just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced it was integrating a new mapping system trained on “Pokémon Go” data which is designed to improve navigation accuracy.
Oh, great, so Nintendo is logging where its players are traveling and selling that data?
If a AAA game is free-to-play, then you are the product and your data is being sold.
My sibling in Talos, did you really think these AR games weren’t going to include tracking user movements when the ENTIRE POINT of the game is to be in specific places and they go out of their way to make sure people aren’t spoofing gps?
Niantic. And always have been
I’m surprised how many people didn’t realise this. I used to play Ingress, which was also from Niantic and similar to Pokémon Go but involved agents and hacking POIs rather than Pokémon trainers and Poké Stops.
Niantic discussed at the time that this was to support their work on the N+1 navigation problem, although I can’t for the life of me find a quoatable reference for this. I played Ingress knowing that my location data was being harvested thinking it was to solve a problem.
I also wonder how many people realise Niantic Labs was started as a Google internal startup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic%2C_Inc.
They have a third data farm in Pikmin Bloom. Wait, does Pikmin Bloom still exist? I did that for a couple months and lost interest.
I joined Ingress during the closed beta, and technically still play, incredibly rarely. Before they started monetizing it with boosts and extra item storage and stuff, it was a really cool, unique game. Meet up with other players of both factions and either blanket the town and spend a couple hours hacking every portal high enough level to give good gear, or battle live for control of real locations. I once fought off a couple by myself, the three of us frantically running around a playground/park for like 90 minutes. Good fun, good exercise too.
When PGO was released, and the swarm of new players to effectively the same game (same backend, same locations, just a different visual and Pokémon instead of Portals and Lore) lots of places got bitchy about people coming around and not buying stuff, getting very Karen about the situation. Pair that with the desire to cash in on both games, and then tightening the requirements and restrictions for android (for a long time, I couldn’t play because I was running GrapheneOS).
I still fire it up when I think about it and have some time, but I haven’t been to a meet-up in over a decade, even longer for an official event. I’m still level 8, so I can interact with all items afaik, but my stats are basically a time capsule of a time forgotten.
The levels go up to 16 now.
Yeah but as far as I know no items (resonators, busters, power cubes…) go higher than 8
That’s kind of the point of those AR games. It’s been obvious from the beginning.
This is a surprise to no one, assuming you have been paying attention.
So you’re saying we can sabotage the robots and improve public transit infrastructure at the same time?
