Make sure it's wired for fiber internet and I will buy a condo in that development.
Imagine ordering something up to the size and weight of a 3.5" HDD (or bacon double cheeseburger) and having it magically appear in your kitchen five minutes later.
If these things became prevalent, packaging could standardize on the capsule cylinder size, like shipping containers. Units containing e.g. 500mL of milk or 5-7 eggs would be perfect.
So instead of tube, how about a delivery robot that's like an alley cat? One which grew up watching Indian Jones and superhero cartoons. And loves tightropes. And wants to be flying squirrel. And is wired into Google RealTime City Map...
I haz the cheezeburger. My human customer hungrily awaits. So I roll down the alley, and around the trash. Pause for traffic, and scoot across the street. Time for my usual northbound path. Up onto the roof. Down a toll zipline to another roof. Leap, wings out, glide, grab a street-pole cable, wings in. Roll along the cable, dodge pole, cable, pole, cable, etc. Roll down a quiet side street. Roof, alley, jump fence. Quick charge station. I consider Uber, but no! Here comes city bus #1726! Leap, electromagnet, hitchhike. Drop, wait for light, down sidewalk. Jump to porch, landing before the hungry human. A human lucky that it is I, city cat, that haz their cheezburger. And not some blind dumb hulking oft-clogged brute of a straw. Though if the straw ever gets built, I may ride that too. I take my bow, and my leave.
What constitutes travel infrastructure depends on what you can cope with. Wrt power, mechanics, sensors, information, and computes. It may be that those advance more rapidly than our ability to build large-scale physical-plant infrastructure. Like cars were easier than moving sidewalks. Robots that can use custom infrastructure where it exists, but can cope "on the ground" in the infrastructure gaps, would have higher complexity cost than say drones. But as costs change...
And hybrids may be interesting. The midday Amazon truck drives down the main road, shedding drones and robots, and taking on those dropped in the morning...
But yeah, that'd be pretty awesome.
Hyperloop? [1] :)
Both Gita and Starship have the feel of a startup with a great video, but problems delivering the product.
These robots don't have the speed and range for a suburban environment, and they can't deal with doors, stairs, and elevators in apartment buildings. That leaves a narrow market niche.
[1] https://www.starship.xyz/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc
And while there are some obvious limitations to wheeled bots as a door-to-door courier system, the market for "personal luggage that follows you", which is more like what Gita is trying, could also be a pretty good one, and less ridiculous looking than "luggage you ride," [0] our current incumbent for luggage innovation. Having a bot stay by you has the gratifying feeling of having a pet or perhaps a servant.
These small scales and low speeds are much more amenable to experimenting, making mistakes, and ceding control than a highway-speed automation, as well. At worst, they're toys, but toys are often a good starting point for serious stuff too. It makes for very efficient R&D.
It might be useful to have a set of suitcases that would follow the user and each other like a train. That would be an amusing option for road cases for rock groups and trade shows.
Redwood City is a good test site for this, because it has both good and bad neighborhoods close together. They can find out how much people will bother it.
It could be handy, except ... you probably can't take it on the bus/train or put it in a car or take it on an airplane.
We aren't safe because it's difficult to hurt someone. We're safe because we keep an eye on the people who would do us harm.
The problems with traffic, pedestrians, accessibility, streetlights, construction, parked cars (illegal, lyfts, etc), pets (and their poop), business signs, trash, human activity blocking the walkways, curb hopping, lane blocking, etc.
There are a designs that could accomplish dealing with a couple of these things, but nothing amazing and easy to implement that would satisfy any reasonable payload without looking/being/feeling cumbersome. Maybe with deployment, social etiquette might change, but in the long run it might be easier to have the city think about implementing lanes/infrastructure for last mile autonomous logistic vehicles to operate.
This is why you typically don't see any autonomous vehicle/agents like this navigating any sort of street with real life obstacles.
Unless you are restricting deliveries to within 2 or 3 miles of where they start from (considering people walk at 3mph, and Segways were banned from sidewalks for going 10mph) you will probably be on the roadway.
I'm a big proponent of refactoring the world to facilitate autonomous agents within our lives, so I think spending money to figure this out is part of what we should be doing.
Perhaps we need more people with similar opinions in government.
That, or a lawn gnome shell with a display saying "I'll give you a cookie to walk me down this street"...
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Sutter-Stockton+Garage,+444+...
But you are folding in a lot of problems with the hand waving of "All you need is one viable path, and the knowledge of city conditions to find it."
Re: HITL/Helper has been considered, but it's not viable to assume there will be someone there in a reasonable amount of time, causing scheduling problems. Predictive models/scheduling theory is important when considering autonomous logistics and resource allocation.
There are a few cases where HITL might be needed, for instance to take over in the case of an obstacle/condition that hasn't been accounted for.
AIU the operational concept should be: show the thing one route once and it will be able to retrace it.
edit: second video
That's different from the military using drones, which are highly trained operators with robots in the air, which is a lot less cluttered.
