Gadgets

Kiwi’s food delivery bots are rolling out to 12 more colleges – TechCrunch

Published

4 years ago

April 26, 2019

If you’re a student at UC Berkeley, the diminutive rolling robots from Kiwi are probably a familiar sight by now, trundling along with a burrito inside to deliver to a dorm or apartment building. Now students at a dozen more campuses will be able to join this great, lazy future of robotic delivery as Kiwi expands to them with a clever student-run model.

Speaking recently at TechCrunch’s Robotics + AI Session at the Berkeley campus, Kiwi’s Felipe Chavez and Sasha Iatsenia discussed the success of their burgeoning business and the way they planned to take it national.

In case you’re not aware of the Kiwi model, it’s basically this: When you place an order online with a participating restaurant, you have the option of delivery via Kiwi. If you so choose, one of the company’s fleet of knee-high robots with insulated, locking storage compartments will swing by the place, your order is put within, and it brings it to your front door (or as close as it can reasonably get). You can even watch the last bit live from the robot’s perspective as it rolls up to your place.

The robots are what Kiwi calls “semi-autonomous.” This means that although they can navigate most sidewalks and avoid pedestrians, each has a human monitoring it and setting waypoints for it to follow, on average every five seconds. Iatsenia told me that they’d tried going full autonomous and that it worked… most of the time. But most of the time isn’t good enough for a commercial service, so they’ve got humans in the loop. They’re working on improving autonomy, but for now this is how it is.

That the robots are being controlled in some fashion by a team of people in Colombia (from where the co-founders hail) does take a considerable amount of the futurism out of this endeavor, but on reflection it’s kind of a natural evolution of the existing delivery infrastructure. After all, someone has to drive the car that brings you your food, as well. And in reality, most AI is operated or informed directly or indirectly by actual people.

That those drivers are in South America operating multiple vehicles at a time is a technological advance over your average delivery vehicle — though it must be said that there is an unsavory air of offshoring labor to save money on wages. That said, few people shed tears over the wages earned by the Chinese assemblers who put together our smartphones and laptops, or the garbage pickers who separate your poorly sorted recycling. The global labor economy is a complicated one, and the company is making jobs in the place it was at least partly born.

Whatever the method, Kiwi has traction: it’s done more than 35,000 deliveries at an increasing rate since it started two years ago (now up to over 10,000 per month) and the model seems to have proven itself. Customers are happy, they get stuff delivered more than ever once they get the app and there are fewer and fewer incidents where a robot is kicked over or, you know, catches on fire. Notably, the founders said onstage, the community has really adopted the little vehicles, and should one overturn or be otherwise interfered with, it’s often set on its way soon after by a passerby.

Iatsenia and Chavez think the model is ready to push out to other campuses, where a similar effort will have to take place — but rather than do it themselves by raising millions and hiring staff all over the country, they’re trusting the robotics-loving student groups at other universities to help out.

For a small and low-cash startup like Kiwi, it would be risky to overextend by taking on a major round and using that to scale up. They started as robotics enthusiasts looking to bring something like this to their campus, so why can’t they help others do the same?

So the team looked at dozens of universities, narrowing them down by factors important to robotic delivery: layout, density, commercial corridors, demographics and so on. Ultimately they arrived at the following list:

Northern Illinois University
University of Oklahoma
Purdue University
Texas A&M
Parsons
Cornell
East Tennessee State University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Stanford
Harvard
NYU
Rutgers

What they’re doing is reaching out to robotics clubs and student groups at those colleges to see who wants to take partial ownership of Kiwi administration out there. Maintenance and deployment would still be handled by Berkeley students, but the student clubs would go through a certification process and then do the local work, like a capsized bot and on-site issues with customers and restaurants.

“We are exploring several options to work with students down the road, including rev share,” Iatsenia told me. “It depends on the campus.”

So far they’ve sent 40 robots to the 12 campuses listed and will be rolling out operations as the programs move forward on their own time. If you’re not one of the unis listed, don’t worry — if this goes the way Kiwi plans, it sounds like you can expect further expansion soon.

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Gadgets

macOS Sonoma drops support for another wide swath of Intel Macs

Published

5 mins ago

June 5, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / macOS Sonoma runs on Intel Macs, but the list is getting awfully short.

Apple

With the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, Apple has finally completed the Apple Silicon transition and booted all Intel Macs from its current lineup. But software support for Intel Macs isn’t quite done, at least not yet. The macOS Sonoma update will still run on a couple generations of Intel Macs, but in general, if you’re using anything made before 2018 or anything without an Apple T2 chip in it, you won’t be able to run the new OS.

Sonoma drops support for all versions of the 12-inch MacBook, the 2017 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air updates, and the 2017 iMac. Macs made after 2017 all generally integrated Apple’s T2 chip, which handled some Touch Bar functionality on some MacBook Pro models, but provided additional security and video encoding features to all Macs that included it. It’s essentially an A10 coprocessor included along with the main Intel CPU, a bridge between the Intel era and the M1 and M2 Macs that would follow.

There is one 2017 Mac that’s still supported: the one and only iMac Pro, released in December of 2017, which was the first Mac to include the T2. There’s also one exception—the 2019 iMac, which doesn’t have a T2 on board but does run the same firmware as the other T2 Macs.

The full macOS Sonoma support list.

Apple

According to two decades’ worth of Mac support data that we have compiled and analyzed, Apple has been dropping support for Intel Macs a bit more quickly in the Apple Silicon era than it was during the height of the Intel Mac era in the early- to mid-2010s. A Mac released between 2009 and 2015 could typically expect between seven and eight years of new macOS releases, but for Macs released in 2016 or 2017, that number is closer to six years.

Apple does provide older macOS releases with around two years of additional security-only updates after replacing them, so people with Macs stuck on macOS 12 Monterey or macOS 13 Ventura should still get Safari updates and patches for the most severe security vulnerabilities after Sonoma is released. For anyone still running macOS 11 Big Sur, the time has come to either upgrade your operating system, upgrade your hardware, or take your chances running without patches.

Gadgets

iOS and iPadOS 17 drop support for iPhone X, first iPad Pros, and other old devices

Published

1 hour ago

June 5, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / StandBy and other iOS 17 features won’t be coming to some older iPhones.

Apple

Apple sometimes releases new operating systems without changing the system requirements—but this year isn’t one of those years. The iOS 17 update will drop support for several older phones that can currently run iOS 16: 2017’s iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, and the original iPhone X.

Apple’s system requirements list the “iPhone XS and newer,” which should encompass the iPhone XR and all subsequent iPhone X-style notched iPhones, plus the 2nd- and 3rd-generation iPhone SE.

The iPadOS 17 update also drops support for most of the pre-2018 devices that iPadOS 16 still supported, including the 5th-gen $329 iPad and the very first 12.9- and 9.7-inch iPad Pros from 2015 and 2016. All other iPad Pros, the third-generation iPad Air and later, and the 5th-generation iPad mini and later will all run iPadOS 17, though the older a device is, the more likely it is to miss out on a handful of newer features (like Stage Manager).

(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)

Most of the iPhones and iPads supported include an Apple A12 Bionic chip or newer (or, for newer iPad Pros, M1 or M2 processors). The 6th-generation iPad and its A10 chip is the sole exception—these cheaper iPads usually use hardware that’s a few generations old to keep the price down.

As for Apple’s other iOS-related platforms, watchOS 10’s system requirements don’t change much. It will still run on any Series 4 or newer Apple Watch, but it does require an attached iPhone running iOS 17. If you have an older phone that can’t upgrade, you won’t be able to run watchOS 10 even if your watch hardware meets the requirements.

Gadgets

Apple reveals Vision Pro, a AR/VR headset unlike any other

Published

2 hours ago

June 5, 2023

Francisco Peguero

Enlarge / Apple’s Vision Pro headset

CUPERTINO, Calif.—After years of speculation, leaks, rumors, setbacks, and rumblings of amazing behind-the-scenes demos, Apple has made its plans for a mixed reality platform and headset public. Vision Pro is “the first Apple Product you look through, not at,” Apple’s Tim Cook said, a “new AR platform with a new product” that “augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world.”

“I believe augmented reality is a profound technology. Blending digital content with the real world can unlock new experiences,” Cook said.

The headset, which looks like a pair of shiny ski goggles, can be controlled in a “fully 3D interface” without a handheld controller. It solely uses your eyes, hands, and voice as an interface, and the unit lets you “control the system simply by looking.” Icons and other UI elements react to your gaze, and you use natural gestures like tapping your fingers or a gentle flick to select them—no need to hold your hands awkwardly in front of you constantly.

In video demonstrations, Apple showed users walking around and grabbing things from a fridge without taking the headset off. And to further keep you from feeling isolated while wearing the headset, a system called EyeSight will display your eyes when someone is nearby, conveying “a critical indicator of connection and emotion.”

Floating 2D apps can be placed to float around your “real world” space, which remains visible through the semi-transparent display. Elements in this interface will cast shadows in the real room around them and respond to light, Apple said. These apps can also “expand fully into your space,” like a pulsating 3D animation in a mindfulness app.

Apple CEO Bob Iger came out to demonstrate a number of customized Vision Pro experiences, from Disney+ support to ESPN sports broadcasts with a wide array of stats filling your room to a virtual Mickey Mouse that walks around your space.

A floating 4K Mac display will appear when users glance at their MacBook display while in the Vision Pro. From there, users can interact with use a virtual keyboard or their voice to type, or make use of a physical Magic Trackpad and/or Magic Keyboard.

While watching movies (including 3D movies) on a virtual floating screen, the device will automatically dim your surroundings to be less distracting. The headset can take spatial photos or videos with the click of a button, which you can re-experience as panoramas that you feel like you’re actually inhabiting, Apple said.

Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play via a floating screen and a handheld controller via Vision Pro “on Day One.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.