This robot is on a mission to eliminate short car trips
Service robots are now an $11 billion industry, according to the International Federation of Robotics, with nearly 200 new fleets launched during the pandemic. Most of those bots are in hospitals — assisting in surgery, for example — and many can be found trundling around warehouses and factories. But Gitamini wasn’t designed to pack boxes, pick oranges or strip minerals from treacherous mines. It has a more straightforward mission: to forestall short car trips. Americans make nearly four such trips per day on average, according to government statistics, and 35% of them are less than 2 miles.
Gita — Italian for “trip” — hopes to be a 28-pound solution to a 5,000-pound problem. “These trips are totally walkable, but nobody’s walking 2 miles with a bag of dog food,” says Greg Lynn, chief executive officer of Gitamini-maker Piaggio Fast Forward. “We definitely want to be part of the ecosystem where you don’t have to take a 2-ton thing to carry two bags of stuff.”
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Seattle Times website.
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