Home   >   News   >   A cargo-carrying robot to follow in your footsteps

A cargo-carrying robot to follow in your footsteps

By on February 3, 2017
Pin It

 

A new “startup” called Piaggio Fast Forward (by Piaggio, the Italian company that makes Vespa scooters) developed a personal “cargo robot” called the Gita.

Gita looks like a carbon fiber take on the exercise ball with tires in a meridian position, and multiple cameras embedded within its shell. It can follow a person, or roll autonomously in an environment it has already mapped. At 26 inches tall, the Gita can carry up to 40 pounds at a time and has a maximum speed of 22 miles per hour, so it can keep up with a person on foot or riding a bike. It can run for about 8 hours of continuous use, the company said.

 

Piaggio Fast Forward has taken a different approach to circumventing traffic on the ground than other startups in this space, such as the delivery drone makers Flirtey and Zipline or Starship Technologies, which makes semi-autonomous personal delivery robots. The Gita has to follow a human around to learn how to navigate around a new environment. Its design allows it to go wherever a person in a wheelchair could go, including ADA-compliant ramps, elevators and grocery store aisles.

Piaggio Fast Forward Chief Operating Officer Sasha Hoffman explained the follow-mode can alleviate some problems faced by autonomous vehicles. She said, “A machine can be intelligent, but isn’t as smart as a human today. Driving down the street and deciding to swerve to avoid hitting a bicyclist or a dog in the road, for example, people make ethical decisions all the time that a self driving car can’t make. If a device is following a person then that person has the lead, and powers the most important decisions around the robot’s movement.”

 

PCBWAY

Source TechCrunch

OpenStore

About Boris Landoni

Boris Landoni is the technical manager of Open-Electronics.org. Skilled in the GSM field, embraces the Open Source philosophy and its projects are available to the community.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *