Comment by baron816
8 hours ago
Anyone reading this who works/runs a robotics company, I really want to encourage you to build a robot to pick up trash on city sidewalks as an early product.
Picking up trash requires a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it’s a simpler problem than many household tasks and it’s probably on par for what these tests show is doable.
I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. If you have robots out in cities providing a public good, not only do they serve as walking advertisements for your company, you’re going to earn some trust before you’re ready deploy them into private spaces.
Plus, governments (or perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities) can be good early customers since you can have a focused sales strategy. Politicians love these types of visible quality of life improvement projects. If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a low cost, many cities are going to want to buy them.
> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes.
I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.
> interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing.
That is pretty far down the list. For the most part, they just want to see what products you have so they can sell you more.
Also, didn't Roomba already leak non-consensual bathroom videos?
I think internet people care about some theoretical surveillance angle more then anyone else actually does. People hire cleaners and tradespeople into their homes all the time.
The practical problems with robots are effectiveness, cost and safety in roughly equal parts.
It is absolutely a PR problem. Privacy is a real concern, but it's the PR that companies are scared of. As, say, Flock have been starting to find out lately. Public backlash matters.
And PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too. For instance, people started avoiding Ring cameras once it got out that they're a privacy nightmare -- that's PR. Sure, the people that avoid them care about privacy -- that's why they're listening -- but PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to. Likewise, PR is how people get creeped out by robots scanning their homes. They already never wanted that, of course, but they weren't creeped out until they learned about it. That's PR. Now people are wary to let any new devices into their homes, especially robots, because of historical PR like this. And so now it is a PR problem to get people to give you a chance in the first place.
Edit: I want to be explicit here that I'm saying you avoid bad PR by not only being good but having people discover the good. And waiting for people to sufficiently discover it can be a struggle. It doesn't matter how good you are if people don't know. That's what I mean by it being a PR problem -- PR is how people know.
That's like saying a law and order problem is a PR problem because word got out that crime is spiking.
The PR problem is downstream consequence of what can be measured, but the root cause is upstream. Focusing directly on solving the downstream problem is basically Goodharting the metric -- thereby ensuring the upstream problem never really gets solved, and the downstream metric becomes fake and decoupled from the true situation.
Once you "solve the PR problem" what is the incentive to ensure that the root problem is actually solved now that you have successfully blinded yourself (society) from measuring the true problem?
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I find your comment bewildering. It seems so focused on the perceived effect of an issue that it leaves no room for the actual material effect of the issue.
Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.
The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.
> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.
Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.
> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.
This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.
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Places that have lots of trash around will vandalize an unsupervised robot.
Places that will leave alone an unsupervised robot don't have lots of trash around.
Entirely disjoint sets.
How are the two correlated?
> If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a * low cost *
The idea sounds good, but I'm curious about the "low cost" part. How do you account for vandalism and theft? A sidewalk robot seems like an easy target for being damaged, stripped for parts, or simply stolen.
You just do it in a more civilised country where things don't immediately get stolen or destroyed. East Asian/some SEA countries.
Plenty of delivery robots in Finland at least, with apparently not much problems with them getting stolen or destroyed.
Starship alone seems to have running operations also in UK, Sweden, Estonia and Czhecia.
the countries where this isn't an issue don't have trash all over their streets either lol.
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Was just in a Waymo in SF and we were attacked by a gang of cyclists repeatedly swerving at and trying to cause our waymo to crash. Really powerless feeling. And they were doing this knowing humans were inside. I don't pretend to know their motivation other than perhaps misplaced social rage, but I'd imagine a litter robot would be immediately destroyed.
Indeed, I was surprised to hear about “Lowell students” robbing people on Muni and “bicyclists” causing trouble in Mission Bay but when I observed some of this anti-social behaviour (when I saw them they were doing wheelies and swerving at people walking) I was rapidly able to discern why the statements were relatively vague as to the categorization.
I suppose it shall be the case for the short term at least that we must admit that “humans” really cause harm. Though perhaps that’s over specific and I should recognize that most crime is committed by eukaryotes.
In SF they would be taken quickly by the homeless for parts, probably the batteries most of all. That and rummaged through for drugs, or repurposed to deliver drugs.
Is this what happens with scooters and lime bikes etc? Because it always strikes me that they’re easy targets for cannibalism yet nobody seems to do it.
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Surely the robot will have the beta crime fighting package installed.
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Having expensive high tech robots picking up litter while there is an ongoing social crisis like homelessness sounds pretty dystopian.
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Just do it in China or Japan.
Cities with the social order required for robotic street cleaning rarely require robotic street cleaning. One might as well suggest a novel heart surgery that works only on healthy patients.
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Japan has much, much less litter to pick up. Turns out when your windows aren't broken, that you take pride in the rest of your community too.
How do you account for it? You simply account for it. Viz. if the cost outweighs the projected benefit, you don't do it.
The robot is likely to have a constant internet connection so it could just call the police.
Alternatively they could add a chain gun to the robot to deal with the vandals
But who is going to pay for all that ammo? That sounds expensive to the tax payer and not ideal for re-election. Perhaps you could employ the robots in ammo factories first to bring the cost of ammunition down and then the frequent use on the lower cla.., I mean criminals, wouldn’t be so costly.
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>add a chain gun to the robot to deal with the vandals
Asimov reeling in his grave.
Incoming vandalism because of stolen jobs or something.
How do you account for vandalism and theft?
You don't consider the problems. That's how you can pretend it'll be low cost.
The cleaning robot might still be a good test bed. But I suspect if you are only in it for efficiency, you would use something like a street sweeper truck. Just like the dishwashing robot that everyone uses at home (the humble 'dishwasher') doesn't use robot arms to mimic how humans wash dishes.
Btw, Singapore shows that we already have proven, low cost techniques for keeping cities clean without robots.
On some level, you must also be into humanoid robots for the cool factor.
There is no reason to ever have a humanoid, except to make humans feel warm and fuzzy.
I wouldn't be so categorical. There might be some applications, or combination of applications for which a humanoid form factor would be useful. It's just that for most applications, more specialised forms are better suited.
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I would like to run a robotics company. But raising for that is super challenging, because you have high execution risk combined with low margins on the final product. It's like the opposite of what western VCs want to see. That's why this type of company is usually founded in China.
And I disagree with you. I'm pretty sure parents worldwide would love a clean-up robot. You can avoid a lot of the risks by making it work only for empty rooms, which is OK because you need to clean up and let the vacuum robot run anyway (when the kids are away sleeping in their bedroom). There's been multiple attempts at building DYI robots to vacuum LEGO bricks off the floor. (Because stepping on them at night is such an immediate pain point.) Unless your product is soaked in hostile behavior and surveillance tech, parents will probably be happy to buy an in-home cleaning robot, no PR needed.
I think the main issue here is that parents are typically busy, which makes them bad startup founders, which is why they cannot "scratch their itch" and turn it into a business.
=> home cleaning robots do not exist because western VCs don't like it and parents aren't usually startup founders.
Same for recycling. A robot that could sort through trash would be phenomenal. You need computer vision, maybe other sensors and also dexterity. After visiting a recycling facility I think nobody should have to work there. It’s just horrible.
As a tech demo sure. But the current tech for this is much better where you just have a camera pointing at the trash falling, and either flipper paddles or air jets to push the trash in to the correct buckets as it’s falling.
I feel like robots that could do this with 100% accuracy might shine too bright a light on how well recycling currently works. And I say that as a proponent of the three Rs.
There’s quite a few companies in that field already. Keen to hear their feedback if they are reading this.
Burning trash works fairly well.
Techno optimism, meet tragedy of the commons.
I’ve had exactly the same idea! Living in LA I sometime imagine how the city will look like in hopefully ten years or less when robots pick up all the litter! Hopefully there will also be landscaping robots and sidewalk/road repair bots too.. those three pretty much are what you need to turn any rundown neighborhood into a sparkling oasis it seems. My other near term idea is just robotic city trash cans, that slowly crawl down the sidewalks on a loop and empty themselves into a big bin in the alley or whatever as part of that loop. I think people probably wouldn’t mess too much with the litter bots either, especially if they work a lot on the sides of freeways. Also people don’t seem to mess too much with the cocos out there delivering food three blocks..
The cost would need to be much cheaper than the PSA then. At a buck per picked up cigarette butt, you could pay a person to do this much faster and more reliably. Heck… I’d do it at that rate.
A buck per?
You could just buy cartons of cigarettes and chop off the butts, at that rate.
And for the illogical conclusion: buy factory equipment to make just the butts to minimise your running costs and limit supply chain dependency.
I joke, but this is surely what would eventuate.
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"Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome."
> perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities
I doubt wealthy HOA communities have much random trash to pick up in the first place
They don’t because they hire people to pick it up
Hmm never seen that in a residential neighborhood, is that a thing? Typically there is not a trash problem simply because the residents are careful enough. Trash doesn't just appear out of nowhere
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+1 if they can also scoop the human feces and power wash the sidewalks in SF.
It’s an outstanding idea.
"your child has been recycled. Here's why that matters."
This is a great idea!