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.
LiDAR mostly uses infrared light, guess what’s NOT invisible to infrared? Glass. Or just take off the infrared filters from the cameras…
TIL
Someone tell Metro Transit. They make changes to my local bus route every few weeks and it’s annoying.
They’re doing it to mess with the delivery robots who would have a perfect record if not for the bus stops being placed in their path constantly.