The pizza robots: will robots be used as messengers?

The owners of the pizzerias today mainly rely on messengers on motorcycles. In honor of the new year, I decided to examine a number of other shipping methods that have the potential to replace the old couriers.

It is hard to think of a phenomenon that has spread around the world more than the simple pizza. With tomato sauce or cream sauce, with cheese or without cheese - the pizza conquered the globe. Every second, 350 pizza triangles are baked, and five billion pizza trays are sold every year worldwide[1]. The fragrant pastry is also behind the invasion of junk food into the home kitchen, as it is especially easy to send it to the customer while it is still warm. Because of this, 83% of all pizzerias provide delivery services directly to the home.

The owners of the pizzerias today mainly rely on messengers on motorcycles. In honor of the new year, I decided to examine a number of other shipping methods that have the potential to replace the old couriers.

Air couriers

Robots that move through the air using rotors, like tiny helicopters, have become a common sight in robotics laboratories all over the world in the last two years. They are accurate, light and capable of surviving falls (usually). See for example the following robots photographed at the GRASP laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania:

When was the last time you had your pizza delivered by air? At the University of Berlin, the students created a flying robot that carries the pizza directly to the customer. The robot looks like a tiny four-bladed helicopter, similar to the famous iDrone, with a carrying surface on which the pizza tray is placed. It rises into the air, far above the heads of the people walking down the street, and reaches the customers in a straight line.

This is not a new idea. Already in 2011, a Taco-Copter website was opened, which offered to use flying robots for taco delivery services. Despite the worldwide enthusiasm for the idea and the many visits to the site, the taco-copter never came into use, and for good reasons. The flying robots are limited by the battery weight they can carry, and thus are unable to stay in the air for more than twenty minutes or so. They have difficulty coping with strong winds, rain, hail or snow. And last but not least - and this is my personal suspicion - once crows and other intelligent birds realize that the tiny helicopters are carrying food that they can eat as soon as it hits the ground, there will be a massive onslaught on the carriers.

Examples of additional control problems encountered by the flying robots

On pleasant days, the flying robots may find use in pizzerias and delivery services with a limited radius and at a limited height - for example those found on university campuses. It is not expected that they will penetrate deeper into the western market, among other things due to the current prohibitions in most western countries on the use of drones for commercial purposes.

Where will they come into use? It is quite possible that the potential of air couriers will be fully realized in remote areas with problematic transportation networks, such as some African and Asian countries. It will be possible to use the air couriers to transfer vaccine loads, medicine and food to villages that are not connected with the main roads. The villagers will be able to load the couriers with items such as blood samples from patients, which will be analyzed in the sophisticated clinics in the cities.

Ground couriers

What about using ground couriers? In the meantime, let's ignore Google's autonomous cars, which are able to navigate the city streets without a driver, and focus on the couriers who are able to bring the pizza directly to the customer, while rolling through the city streets.

One messenger of this type was developed during a television challenge of a show on the Discovery Channel - 'Make a prototype for you!' (Prototype This!). The robot resembles a two-wheeled Segway in its structure, capable of recreating routes programmed into it, and bypassing obstacles on the way such as people and cars parked on the road. He carries the pizzas in a heated oven, and the customer is required to identify himself with his credit card to receive the pizza.

Sounds good? Definitely. But there is still a long way to go before such a robot can successfully navigate the sidewalks of a bustling city, dodging the citizens pouncing on its path at every moment, and still maintaining the original course. It is also hard to believe that the passers-by themselves will be satisfied with the robots blocking their path and obstructing traffic on the sidewalk. The road, after all, was invented for motorized vehicles - and this definition fits the robotic pizza deliveryman well.

Is it possible to make a robotic pizza delivery boy that will roll on the roads, similar to a motorcycle, but will also be able to get on the sidewalk when necessary? In principle, this is not an impossible problem. Google's autonomous vehicles already exist today, and travel on the roads without being directed by a human hand and without causing accidents. But Google's cars have received permission to hit the roads in only three states in the United States, and even then there is a requirement that a person sit behind the wheel, just to be safe. There is still nothing to talk about about fully autonomous robots that will race on the roads.
Summary

It does not seem that robotic messengers will come into use in the next decade in Western countries. The aerial robots mainly satisfy the 'cool' lust of the engineers, but cannot function reliably in the weather conditions, especially in Europe and the United States. The ground robots will not be allowed to crawl on the tiresome city sidewalks, nor will they get on the roads any more in the coming years.

Will humans continue to serve humans forever? According to a survey conducted as part of the TechCast project (full disclosure: the author is one of the experts participating in the project), only in 2027 will smart robots - those that sense their surroundings and make decisions accordingly - appear in thirty percent of businesses. Until then, we'll have to continue to fend for ourselves.

But so you don't feel squeamish, here's a video to cheer you up for a robotic Christmas!