Author: Dan Maloney / Source: Hackaday
We’ve been occasionally exploring examples of what could be the killer application for self-driving vehicles: autonomous freight deliveries, both long-haul and local, as well as some special use cases. Some, like UAV delivery of blood and medical supplies in Kenya, have taken off and are becoming both profitable and potentially life-saving.
Others, like driverless long-haul trucking, made an initial splash but appear to have gone quiet since then. This is to be expected, as the marketplace picks winners and losers in a neverending quest to maximize return on investment. But the whole field seems to have gotten a bit sleepy lately, with no big news of note for quite a while.That changed last week with Amazon’s announcement of Scout, their autonomous delivery vehicle. Announced first on Amazon’s blog and later picked up by the popular and tech press who repeated the Amazon material almost verbatim, Scout appears at first glance to be a serious attempt by Amazon to own the “last mile” of delivery – the local routes that are currently plied by the likes of UPS, FedEx, and various postal services. Or is it?
Too Much Deadheading
The Scout project is apparently well-supported at the executive level within Amazon, being headed up by a vice president, and is currently hiring a bunch of developers and engineers to work on it in the company’s Seattle research labs. They’ve even gone so far as to partner with Snohomish County, which encompasses communities north of Seattle and is home to many Amazonians, to test the autonomous delivery robot on its streets.
For as serious and glitzy as the effort appears, though, Scout seems a little underwhelming. The video accompanying its introduction is typical corporate fare, and reminds us very much of the announcement of Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service in terms of production values. In the Scout video, we see a rather unassuming six-wheel electric vehicle navigating suspiciously deserted sidewalks and streets on its way to a customer’s home. The vehicle itself looks like what everyone is describing it as – a cooler on wheels. Upon arrival in front of the destination, Scout parks on the sidewalk and waits for the recipient to approach, whereupon it pops its top to reveal the Amazon goodness inside. The vehicle presumably then returns to some sort of distribution facility to pick up the next package.
Without reading too much into the video, this scheme seems to have…
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