Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?
Are you kidding me? It was all basically vaporware that disappeared when the free money ended. The Kiwi food delivery robots were basically fake -- they only went about 1&#x2F;8 of a mile automatically. So they&#x27;d drive a car to the end of a street with your food and a robot, and then get the robot out of the car, put the food inside, and then the robot would hobble over a couple hundred feet to your door. Absolutely useless.<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;article&#x2F;Kiwibots-win-fans-at-UC-Berkeley-as-they-deliver-13895867.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;article&#x2F;Kiwibots-win-fa...</a><p>&gt; The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go<p>&gt; On the ground in Berkeley, people also do a lot of robot support. Traveling at 1 to 1½ mph, the bots would take too long to chug to local restaurants, so Kiwi workers pick up the food at restaurants and take it via bikes or scooters to meeting spots around campus to insert into an insulated bag in the bots’ storage compartment.<p>&gt; The average distance a robot covers for a delivery is about 200 meters (656 feet, or one-eighth of a mile) which makes them fall short of a “last-mile” solution.