Are you kidding me? It was all basically vaporware that disappeared when the free money ended. The Kiwi food delivery robots were basically fake -- they only went about 1/8 of a mile automatically. So they'd drive a car to the end of a street with your food and a robot, and then get the robot out of the car, put the food inside, and then the robot would hobble over a couple hundred feet to your door. Absolutely useless.
> The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go
> On the ground in Berkeley, people also do a lot of robot support. Traveling at 1 to 1½ mph, the bots would take too long to chug to local restaurants, so Kiwi workers pick up the food at restaurants and take it via bikes or scooters to meeting spots around campus to insert into an insulated bag in the bots’ storage compartment.
> The average distance a robot covers for a delivery is about 200 meters (656 feet, or one-eighth of a mile) which makes them fall short of a “last-mile” solution.
Much like Theranos, basic immutable laws of nature make the whole idea absurd. Namely, that it requires a ton of energy to keep an object aloft.
It's just wildly inefficient, and will never see serious usage outside of tiny niches. Not until we get science fiction antigravity or tiny fusion reactors or something.
I would bet that even the worst Amazon truck gets more pounds of product per Joule expended than the best drone for any reasonably real world distance/load.
The difference is both direct ground contact and fuel capacity.
Even if a drone could carry the energy equivalent of a 20 gallon fuel tank with it, it would waste the majority of that energy both keeping itself and its energy aloft.
Tires and other ground plane vehicles, mitigate the majority of that waste in exchange for increased navigational difficulty (regarding obstacles like buildings and trees but also moving objects like vehicles in its path).
The self-driving robots made some sense but only for very local (couple of block radius) delivery.
Anything that does not have to be constantly and continuously pumped with more energy in order to not immediately crash is going to be more efficient than the alternative.
A paraglider drone with a tiny parachute would be more efficient than any 3/4/6/8 motor drone copter
As usual, the difference is energy density between hydrocarbon fuels and Li-ion batteries. Power the drone with gas and it becomes a different story. But then you just re-created the helicopter and all the problems which explain why no one is doing helicopter package deliveries.
Amazon's delivery always felt odd to me because of this exact situation. Long term how sustainable can it be to work on such an extreme scale like that? The margins they must be hiding on via products must be good.
Ironically one of the areas it _is_ being used successfully is in delivery of blood to some areas in Rwanda, but they're using fixed-wing drones and are even doing slingshot launches. [1]
The economics are totally different, though. The "product" is very high value and has a short shelf life, so being able to deliver it quickly is a big benefit.
On top of that, using a fixed-wing delivery vehicle and launching it with a human-powered slingshot makes it actually reasonably energy-efficient.
While this may be correct when all possible types of deliveries (weight/distance/geography) are taken into account there are definitely cases where drone delivery is going to be substantially cheaper than similar delivery by vehicle.
Maybe it's my proximity to large bodies of water, but there are many island communities where I live that have limited (or no) road access requiring either a very out-of-the-way route to reach a destination or -- worse -- a ferry. A trip out to some communities could be the difference between a mile travel by air vs 10 miles travel by vehicle.
That's an extreme outlier, obviously, but if you dial that back a bit and use, say, "a trip from my home to my girlfriend's" which involves working around two rivers that roads only cross at certain points, the difference is 5 miles "as the crow flies" vs almost 14 miles of windy roads.
When all of the other problems are worked out, a drone delivery service could augment regular delivery to reduce costs/improve delivery time for products.
I think products that greatly benefit from improved delivery time, though, is the place where drone delivery can be successful. It's currently being used in some countries for blood/medical deliveries and that was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of places where drone delivery would be able to be compete/displace existing providers.
I had a friend who flew a helicopter for a company that moved people/organs/other emergency-releated activities for hospitals. Organ transplants, as I understand them, are extremely time-sensitive. One day he was called on to deliver a liver from a hospital nearby to a hospital mid-state for a waiting patient. Weather, wind, clouds and other variables were excellent; he was on-call and a ways out but made it. Shortly after take-off the helicopter suffered a failure (memory escapes me), it crashed resulting in the death of my friend, (I think) a passenger and ultimately the patient waiting for the organ.
This was 20-ish years ago and in the time since then it was discovered that part of the pre-flight check was skipped and IIRC[0] the crash was determined to be related to condensation in the fuel tank or something along those lines -- basically, he was on-call with a tight delivery schedule and cut a corner to account for the time it took him to get to the hospital for the delivery.
Drone delivery would improve several things in this model. The most obvious one being "no dead pilot or passenger" when something goes awry. If we're "flying things around" especially using small aircraft and GA pilots, there's going to be crashes -- drones or people involved -- it's a guarantee. Using drones would enable deliveries to take place without delays involved in "waking up a pilot on-call/waiting for their arrival" -- allowing hospital staff to prepare the delivery vehicle, make a call, and hand off to a remote drone pilot to get it to its destination. Assuming software/user interfaces can make piloting a drone remotely as safe as flying a helicopter "in person", the benefits would be enough to offset the higher delivery costs.
[0] I tried to find a reference online to refresh my memory but was unable so forgive my memory if I've got some details wrong here.
Surprisingly, I still see them around in Berkeley. As a pedestrian they're a bit annoying underfoot but mostly harmless. As a potential customer, they're so slow and ineffective that I've never felt tempted to try them out. They're thoroughly dull even as a novelty.
Hmm, I don't live there anymore but have visited the university a few times lately. Haven't seen any Kiwi bots. Last time was this month, which is summer and not peak business there, but other times were during school.
> > > The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go
ooh ooh! When people say reporting can be racist, this is a perfect example! Including extra negative details that are not pertinent to the story at all.
Imagine if every story about a US company mentioned started with, "The new startup, which is based in the United States (home of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy)..."
SFChronicle could have instead opened with: "people in Colombia (a country with free childcare)" or "people in Colombia (a country that has worked to eliminate childhood hunger)", but, instead, blatant racism!
Felipe Chavez is the CEO and one of the founders of the company they're talking about. That's why they mention his two co-founders. All from Columbia.
From your examples I assume you thought they were talking about the Chavez from Venezuela? I don't know of any other Chavez that could get that kind of reaction.
Anyway, unless I've missed something, that hair trigger might need some adjustment.
> Imagine if every story about a US company mentioned started with, "The new startup, which is based in the United States (home of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy)..."
If Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy founded a company together then your headline would make sense, but I don't understand why this would compare to anything the author of this article wrote.
I think you ran across the Chavez name and your brain stopped processing. Its evident in your replacement examples not even making sense in the original quote.
It seems you may be the one having issues with race.
This is a silly comment and a perfect example of seeing only what you want to see. The founder’s name is “Chavez” - he’s not referencing Hugo Chavez here.
> ooh ooh! When people say reporting can be racist, this is a perfect example! Including extra negative details that are not pertinent to the story at all.
From https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-fa...
> The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go
> On the ground in Berkeley, people also do a lot of robot support. Traveling at 1 to 1½ mph, the bots would take too long to chug to local restaurants, so Kiwi workers pick up the food at restaurants and take it via bikes or scooters to meeting spots around campus to insert into an insulated bag in the bots’ storage compartment.
> The average distance a robot covers for a delivery is about 200 meters (656 feet, or one-eighth of a mile) which makes them fall short of a “last-mile” solution.