I too am an expert and I think they look brilliant! A true revolution to the business! Certainly no obvious problems or shortcomings!
[Comment paid for by Evri]
I have seen the ones they are actually using in the US and they are very robust with 4 wheels and low centres of gravity. These things in comparison look like a total joke. Anyone can see they are going to be terrible which really makes you wonder about the abilities of whoever gave the go ahead for them.
Don't worry, the porch pirates will see to that. Finally get them to do some leg work instead of hanging around the estates waiting for the scheduled delivery
Seems like they're trying to overengineer something, those 4-wheel robots in Milton Keynes are surely better than this? They couldn't handle stairs or tricky terrain, but you could surely get them to map a local area and figure out step-free routes.
Also, surely this can only deliver a few small parcels at a time? Paying rock bottom rates to have someone drive a car full of parcels seems like it would surely be cheaper than this.
I don't even mind wheels on legs, that's pretty neat for climbing steps, but just give it three of them so it doesn't need to waste so much computation, effort, and energy on constantly balancing!
I believe the idea of the delivery robots is not to replace the man in the van entirely (that's a different thing to replace) but to replace the man delivering from van to door.
Let's say you live at the postcode AB12 3CD. Instead of the driver bringing your parcel to your front door, they would have a drop-off location for AB12 (or maybe AB11-13, depending on how large areas are), and from there the robots would drive to your front door.
It doesn't matter if the robots are slow, because all of the deliveries for the expensive asset (the human) have been made. So Evri only need to pay the driver for the trip between the local depot and the drop-off point, rather than local depot to your house, to David's house, to Emma's house, etc. until their van is empty.
But we have to make this sound like something YOU would want, otherwise why would you accept robots driving along the streets all day? Simple. With the delivery robot, you can specify when you will be available. Rather than Evri saying "We will deliver your parcel between 2pm-3pm" (and then not showing up until 3:30pm and leaving it behind a bin anyway), they will say "Your parcel is now at your local drop-off point, when do you want it" - and if you're a 20 minute "drive" (at robot speed) away, you can have it to your door as soon as 20 minutes from now.
Obviously, there will still need to be some deliveries made from the van, for example if you have ordered a flatpack wardrobe; the robot won't be able to carry that. But it cuts out all of the door-to-door deliveries for the smaller items.
Personally, I think the design of their robot makes sense... But it's flawed.
I can see the vision. Two long "legs" which will be able to adjust to slopes and whatnot better than the smaller 4-wheel robots that Milton Keynes used. But the legs on Evri's robot need to be further spread apart (not sure if they can do this though, without it being too wide to be used on a pavement) and a third wheel (so it's in a tricycle layout) to ensure it is less likely to fall over.
But you still have to have someone loading the parcels into the robot at the drop-off point, and at that stage the human may as well do the drop-offs themselves. They and the parcels are already right there lol
I could just imagine having a shocker of a day at work. Or you just had a big argument with your partner or something. Just an absolute shit day. And you see this trundling two wheeled toaster coming towards you.
What are you supposed to do ? Not Spartan kick it ? That’s impossible .
Three wheels would be fine as well and a lot more stable. Most human-targetted environments are also made to accomodate wheelchairs, pushchairs etc., and it's not like these things are going to be scaling the north face of the Eiger.
Why've they chosen such a tall robot that can't self-recover if it topples as their vehicle?? This seems like a much harder problem to solve in the UK than it is in somewhere like LA, as we tend to have slightly more avant-garde public walkways
Now I’m picturing a depot run run by the various Robot Wars robots! Sgt Bash immolating parcels, Sir Kill-a-lot picking them up with the jaws of life, Matilda whacking them into the van with the flywheel… all while Johnathon Pearce commentates.
Ah yes, just what you need with your fragile glassware, the Evri robot falling onto its back and flipping upright with an aggressive bash into the ground 😂 to be fair I guess it’ll still arrive in better condition than most Evri deliveries
Yeah and there's no way it will handle a heavy dense load or something where the weight can shift internally.
And no way it can handle tree lined roads, uneven curves, broken pavements, bins, fly tipped rubbish, dog shit, curb parkers, teenagers, flying ant day...
Who on earth thought something tall with high centre of gravity carrying a potentially heavy and probably unsecured weight, and only two skinny wheels close together would ever be a good idea? There are small children who could tell you that's dumb. I get that the idea is the device compensates and use gyros etc, but that just isn't going to work outside ideal circumstances. Anything that would work across a wide range of conditions, obstacles and the like is likely to be prohibitively expensive.
I made this clip. Look, it was a Friday, I'd tripped at lunch and got fucking soup all down me, I lost a contact lens, I was a bit rough from an unplanned 6 pints Thurs arvo, I just couldn't be fucked to get all the equipment out the car so I just did it on my phone while I was in a maccies shitter. Just leave it will ya?
Also stealing yet more pavement space which should be for pedestrians. Who are already squeezed for space as it is with things like pavement parking you can even see in this video. Pavement delivery robots just should not be allowed.
The obvious joke is that as shit as this robot is is as good as the service Evei delivers now. And the horrible truth in that joke is that Evri will happily deliver as poor a service as they can whilst still making money. So obviously replacing the humans will give them better margins and they can better afford to deliver shit service.
I can’t see how this wouldn’t work? Artillery has been used for centuries and isn’t far off the mark, at least closer to being delivered than Evri’s conventional methods.
Once they've worked out the legs, they plan to start working on the robot's arms so it can replicate the Evri experience and yeet those parcels over your fence.
"You need the energy efficiency of wheels, but the multi-terrain capabilities of legs"
So they chose the worst combination of both: the instability of only two legs, with two tiny wheels underneath that hard-limit speed and terrain type. It seems like it's requiring a lot of power to constantly adjust it's center of balance.
I can't imagine what the designer was thinking. Perhaps they got this concept from the founder of this robotics company and made exactly as asked, because this is flawed from the get-go.
And also never mind that this is 100% going to be damaged and broken into in areas that are anything less than perfectly safe.
Noticed that too. One out of how many attempts I wonder.
Years ago we trialled a courier company. Out of 6 parcels for the trial one was lost, one was delivered to an incorrect address, and one was returned to us damaged, it was wet and had tyre marks from their truck, which they only admitted was them when questioned.
The best bit, the week after the sales rep returned to ask how they'd done!
As soon as engineers started looking like him and less like aging, jeans and check shirt wearing, worry-warts with small pencils and furrowed brows robitics went to shit.
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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 10h ago
I'm no expert but the robot looks ridiculously unstable?