Gadgetory

what's better than having your shopping delivered straight to your door having it delivered to your door by a robot we're taking a look at a local delivery robot that's built by starship technologies let's investigate so let's talk about the robot itself that's got GPS so that it knows whereabouts on the streets it is it's got nine cameras around it if you open it up here you can see it will hold about two to three shopping bags so travels about six kilometers per hour and the idea here is that you wouldn't own this it would be owned by for example local businesses or supermarkets and when you ordered from them this thing would be sent all the way along the pavement to your house so what happens when it encounters an obstacle well that's quite cool actually this thing is described as being semi autonomous so what that means is that for the most part it'll be able to navigate its own way around but if it encounters an obstacle it will basically send a message back to its control room where a human where the computer will take a look at its camera feed and assess whether or not it can proceed or whether it needs to reroute now I asked about security if this thing that's got your precious shopping and it wants to stop someone from running up and running off with it well apart from the fact that it's quite heavy I thought that basically because this thing is covered in so many cameras and sensors and it's got to wade audio as well basically the idea is that you'd have to be crazy to steal it because you're going to be so clearly identified so it's still in the early stages it's in testing now I have to say I do like it though I think it's a cool idea it doesn't hurt that the robots really cute and this one we're seeing here is being controlled by a game controller but ultimately I would like to see these rolling around streets I think there are a lot of potentially brilliant cases where this could come in handy for example if you were buying some clothes I really like that do a robot rolling up you opening it up trying everything on and the stuff that you don't like just popping it back in the robot and sending it back to the shop finally I'm told that the robot hasn't yet been officially named so if you have any good ideas maybe pop them in the comments all right that's all for now but check out cnet.com slash n WC for much more