One of the reasons I love being in New York City is that you can get virtually any type of food delivered at any time. Tampa is hardly a backwater but pre-covid we didn’t have a robust food delivery infrastructure unless you wanted pizza. Of course, all that’s changed now. Just like the Big Apple, we here in Tampa can get a meal or even our groceries delivered to our door.
Humans driving cars around to deliver food doesn’t seem all that efficient so, of course, the Geek in me is interested in other solutions. One such solution—probably best suited to smaller areas such as campuses—is the delivery robot. If you haven’t seen one, think of a beer cooler on wheels. They autonomously navigate from the provider to your door.
It’s easy to imagine a lot of ways things could go wrong but here’s one that didn’t occur to me:
Difficult situation on campus. Traffic jam of automated food delivery robots, apparently all stuck behind a carelessly discarded scooter. I just observed a couple of students clearing a path out of pity for the robots. This is our future, I guess pic.twitter.com/4VjjaRAaBk
— Sean Hecht (@seanhecht) February 15, 2022