Your curbside delivery order is here
 

The NHTSA has approved Nuro's low-speed autonomous electric delivery vehicle on public roadways. They received the federal safety exemption from the US DOT; without the need for safety provisions for human-controlled vehicles like windshield wipers, side or rear view mirrors, steering wheels or accelerator of brake pedals. They were subjected to federal standards for low-speed vehicles to travel under 25 miles per hour. Those vehicles didn’t need steering wheels or brake pedals or human backup drivers, but they need to be monitored and can be remotely controlled by a human operator. The second-gen Nuro 'R2' vehicles will be used by partners Walmart and Kroger to deliver groceries with curbside services. R2s have soft collapsible front bumpers and temperature controlled storage compartments.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gzjo...nfographic.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKXb...ature=emb_logo

I was thinking something like that would be among the first AVs in use. You get a single operator to keep an eye on something like 20 of them on a cluster of monitors. I think farming will be similar someday, with an operator being responsible to monitor many autonomous machines at once.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njCE5i_QBSw

Now, how to get those robots to cook the food and shove it in my face, cause who wants to get up or chew their own food? :P

"Now, how to get those robots to cook the food and shove it in my face, cause who wants to get up or chew their own food? :P" You beat me to it!

Here is Utopia (It only needs more population to be perfect): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-kdRdzxdZQ

I'd rather have been the first to hooky bob one of those. I do hope with a 25 mph max speed they only allow them on roads with a 25 mph speed limit or less.

Last year I drove around FL including The Villages. What. An. Eye. Opener. In a place like that I could see a thing like this working -- although I have a real problem with letting other people choose my produce. Where I live we hardly have cell signal, never mind the population density required, so I'm gonna go ahead and assume I won't be seeing one of these gizmos any time soon.

I'm the opposite. I don't care about broccoli, lettuce, or tomatoes, but nobody can pick good meat. We use the pickup service at Walmart all the time but not for meat. I like the pickup, not having to walk around finding what I want and then run through a checkout, no extra charge. You just pull up and sign, and they put it in the trunk. I would think curbside is a complicated extra step when I drive past the store 2 times a day anyway.

That is my concern too.

I let my dad take on the task of purchasing lumber for my projector screen for Super Bowl Sunday, and being old he decided it would be more convenient to order online and just roll up in the truck and load it in. The 12' boards curved an inch or more over the length. Because I'm a newb, I just started building the frame without thinking to check that newly purchased materials were acceptable.

I ended up spending half an hour going through every board in the store to get the 2 straightest pieces. I'd say only 10% were acceptable enough to make anything out of, and the rest were garbage.

I'm making a shelf out of the garbage pieces we got from online ordering.

On the plus side, maybe we'll have less food waste since the less desirable food will be evenly distributed to everyone instead of tossed like they do now.