Gita – autonomous lightweight delivery system
At Asteria, we were looking for a proof of concept implementation of something we&#x27;re working on. One of my friends worked as an engineer&#x2F;designer at Buell (motorcycles), is a mech engineer, has done loads of work on electric vehicles, and is interested in autonomous vehicle tech. He flew out here and we decided to walk the streets of San Francisco to consider dimensionality required to successfully autonomously navigate sidewalks downtown. Our test was just delivering keys from my place (Stock + Sutter) to a friend&#x27;s house (Gough + Market).<p>The problems with traffic, pedestrians, accessibility, streetlights, construction, parked cars (illegal, lyfts, etc),  pets (and their poop), business signs, trash, human activity blocking the walkways, curb hopping, lane blocking, etc.<p>There are a designs that could accomplish dealing with a <i>couple</i> of these things, but nothing amazing and easy to implement that would satisfy any reasonable payload without looking&#x2F;being&#x2F;feeling cumbersome. Maybe with deployment, social etiquette might change, but in the long run it might be easier to have the city think about implementing lanes&#x2F;infrastructure for last mile autonomous logistic vehicles to operate.<p>This is why you typically don&#x27;t see any autonomous vehicle&#x2F;agents like this navigating any sort of street with real life obstacles.