機器人送貨到家
8 robots racing to win the delivery wars of 2019
By Jesus Diaz fastcompany
CES 2019 has brought three new automated robot vehicles to an already hotly contested race to get your dinner, groceries, and packages to your home or office desk.
The goal of all these robots is to deliver for what the industry calls the “last mile,” or the distance from a local depot to a final destination. Right now, these routes are covered by humans in cars or vans. This is inefficient–it uses too much energy and worsens congestion. In some cases, for instance on campuses or inside large office complexes, it’s time-consuming and impractical.
Enter delivery robots. These small bots could, in theory, solve many of these “last mile” problems by offering an efficient, quick, and inexpensive way to get your stuff whenever you needed it. This is easier said than done; there are plenty of unanswered questions about how these bots should operate in society. They must be good citizens, respect humans, and do their job as invisibly as possible. All without getting attacked or bursting into flames first.
There’s a competition afoot to build the best delivery bot–and deploy them successfully in the real world. Here are some of the front-runners.
Meet the Loomo Delivery: a completely autonomous hauling robot debuted last week at CES 2019 by Segway, the personal mobility company (which seems to be doing lots of weird stuff these days).
If the Loomo looks like an office copier, well, that may be because it’s actually designed for use in offices. Segway’s aim here seems to be to own delivery within the many offices in the world that are large enough to need their own automated internal delivery systems to replace their human counterparts. The company says it’s aiming at China’s booming delivery market too, where the “last-mile delivery and takeout services market has been rapidly expanding with an annual growth rate of 30% to 50%.”
The company’s bot uses 4G or Wi-Fi to connect to the cloud to automatically set up map routes, adjust schedules, and be monitored by its human masters in real time. It can deliver a maximum weight of about 110 pounds. The technology that powers the Loomo Delivery bot is already available for preorder–but as a “personal transporter” that hearkens back to the company’s most famous product. The company says that the transporter’s success drove them to the development of Loomo Delivery.
Anybotics and Continental also introduced a new robot delivery system at CES 2019–one that scares the hell out of me after watching Metalhead, the Black Mirror episode about the hunting robo-dog assassin.
The two companies have invented a two-part solution: First, there’s an autonomous delivery van developed by Continental. Then, inside the van, there are robotic dogs developed by Anymal. When it gets to a particular area, the delivery van doors open and the dogs emerge, carrying packages and their destinations in their little AI-powered brains. This solves the problem of the limited range of small delivery bots. By deploying them from a larger vehicle, they can easily reach their destination and get back to the mothership to ride to another destination while recharging.
The companies say the robot dogs can carry your stuff on sidewalks, through doors, and up elevators and stairs–all the way to your home or office door. When it gets where it’s supposed to be, it places your package on your doorstep and rings your doorbell. Rest well for now, though: There’s no date for deployment yet.
This cute robot is Serve, a tiny electric beast that can carry up to 50 pounds over a 30-mile radius. According to Postmates–the delivery company looking to replace its costly gig-economy workers with a piece of machinery that never complains–the bot is designed to make people around it feel at ease.
For starters, the LIDAR-powered bot has big humanoid eyes, like Pixar’s cute robot Wall-E. Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann said in a press note that these eyes are not just decoration: “We have developed a specific rover-human interface so that people understand what rovers are doing at any moment.” Postmates clearly hopes that Serve’s human-centered design will help it avoid running into people or clogging up sidewalks–common issues with delivery bots.
時空旅遊 回到過去?
How Traveling Back In Time Could Really, Physically Be Possible
It’s one of the greatest tropes in movies, literature, and television shows: the idea that we could travel back in time to alter the past. From the time turner in Harry Potter to Back To The Future to Groundhog Day, traveling back in time provides us with the possibility of righting wrongs in our own past. To most people, it’s an idea that’s relegated to the realm of fiction, as every law of physics indicates that motion forward through time is an absolute necessity. Philosophically, there’s also a famous paradox that seems to indicate the absurdity of such a possibility: if traveling backwards through time were possible, you’d be able to go back and kill your grandfather before your parents were ever conceived, rendering your own existence impossible. For a long time, there seemed to be no way to go back. But thanks to some very interesting properties of space and time in Einstein’s General Relativity, traveling back in time may be possible after all.
An illustration of the early Universe as consisting of quantum foam, where quantum fluctuations are large, varied, and important on the smallest of scales. Positive and negative energy fluctuations can create minuscule, quantum wormholes.
The place to start is with the physical idea of a wormhole. In our known Universe, we have tiny, minuscule quantum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime on the smallest of scales. These include energy fluctuations in both the positive and negative directions, often very close by one another. A very strong, dense, positive energy fluctuation would create curved space in one particular fashion, while a strong, dense, negative energy fluctuation would curve space in exactly the opposite fashion. If you connected these two curvature regions together, you could — for a brief instant — arrive at the notion of a quantum wormhole. If the wormhole lasted for long enough, you could even potentially transport a particle through it, allowing it to instantly disappear from one location in spacetime and reappear in another.
Exact mathematical plot of a Lorentzian wormhole. If one end of a wormhole is built out of positive mass/energy, while the other is built of negative mass/energy, the wormhole can become traversible. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Kes47.
If we want to scale that up, however, to allow something like a human being through, that’s going to take some work. While every known particle in our Universe has positive energy and either positive or zero mass, it’s eminently possible to have negative mass/energy particles in the framework of General Relativity. Sure, we haven’t discovered any yet, but according to all the rules of theoretical physics, there’s nothing forbidding it.
If this negative mass/energy matter exists, then creating both a supermassive black hole and the negative mass/energy counterpart to it, while then connecting them, should allow for a traversible wormhole. No matter how far apart you took these two connected objects from one another, if they had enough mass/energy — of both the positive and negative kind — this instantaneous connection would remain. All of that is great for instantaneous travel through space. But what about time? Here’s where the laws of special relativity come in.
A “light clock” will appear to run different for observers moving at different relative speeds, but this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein’s law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place, but it means that the stationary and the moving parties age at different rates.
If you travel close to the speed of light, you experience a phenomenon known as time dilation. Your motion through space and your motion through time are related by the speed of light: the greater your motion through space, the less your motion through time. Imagine you had a destination that was 40 light years away, and you were able to travel at incredibly high speeds: over 99.9% the speed of light. If you got into a spaceship and traveled very close to the speed of light towards that star, then stopped, turned around, and returned back to Earth, you’d find something odd.
Due to time dilation and length contraction, you might reach your destination in only a year, and then come back in just another year. But back on Earth, 82 years would have passed. Everyone you know would have aged tremendously. This is the standard way time travel physically works: it takes you into the future, with the amount of travel forward in time dependent only on your motion through space.
Is time travel possible? With a large enough wormhole, such as one created by a supermassive black hole connected to its negative mass/energy counterpart, it just might be.
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