![electric six gay bar censorship electric six gay bar censorship](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MUGb7dn9EkM/maxresdefault.jpg)
“There were no accidents, no technical issues and no vandalism.” On its first run on city sidewalks, “people thought it was super cool, and were breaking out their cameras,” Tracy Gray, Mountain View’s Library Services Director told TechCrunch. “Right now, we just want to learn how this would work, how it operates and what kinds of problems we’d run into,” he said. Google team leader Christian Bersch told at the time that the pilot project would last nine months. Once the user had deposited the books in the cargo compartment, the robot would return to the library, where workers would check in the materials. The BookBot would then navigate to their home and text them when it had arrived. Users could request a pick-up of books via the library’s website. The robot was designed to carry up to 50 pounds of cargo, and traveled on sidewalks at a maximum speed of 4.5 miles per hour. The 32-inch tall BookBot, which is pictured below, was equipped with a suite of sensors for autonomous operation and could be remote controlled by a human operator if needed. Around the same time, the city of Mountain View decided to allow pilot programs for personal delivery devices (PDDs).ĭiscussions between Area 120 and Mountain View began in the summer of 2018 and by late February 2019, the BookBot began operating one day a week for the city’s library system.Īpart from its book-collecting duties, the electric six-wheeled device worked in a similar way to the delivery robots made by Amazon, Starship Technologies and Marble. The Google project incubator formed a group in early 2018 to explore autonomous robots.
![electric six gay bar censorship electric six gay bar censorship](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SQe22QAfo7s/maxresdefault.jpg)
Since 2016, Area 120 has produced around a dozen apps and services, including a crowdsourced transit app, an educational video platform, a virtual customer service agent for small businesses, and an emoji-based guessing game.īookBot stood out as Area 120’s first publicly announced hardware project. But the project faltered after just a few months, as Google pulled back from retail delivery.Ĭartken was founded by engineers of the Bookbot program as well as a logistics expert who was once in charge of operations at Google Express, the service integrated last year into Google Shopping.Īrea 120 is a low-key version of Google’s famous X moonshot factory, a place where small teams rapidly build new products that they have a personal interest in. Unlike Amazon, which acquired robot maker Dispatch to help build its Scout delivery device, Google harnessed the talent of its own engineers and logistics experts to develop a sidewalk robot within the walls of Google’s Area 120 incubator. The secretive startup called Cartken was formed in fall 2019 after Google shuttered an internal program to develop a delivery robot - a move that was prompted by the tech giant’s decision to scale back efforts to compete with Amazon in shopping. The engineers behind Google’s short-lived Bookbot - a robot created within the company’s Area 120 incubator for experimental products - have launched their own startup to bring the sidewalk delivery bot back to life.