Bitcoin Forum

Small robots that can deliver small packages from one location to another on air and ground. They are tracked through an encrypted interface.

Operators operate robots remotely, share code and data for further improvement of courier AI and credited through bitcoin micropayment system.

Bigger payments incentivize courier operators to pick up object and deliever it to another location where other operators can pick it up.

Obviously, something need to be figured out to prevent operators engage in robotic combat for packages, not get into traffic accidents, not get package stolen, and so on.

Imagine a botnet of these!

Would taking a deposit from a robot who wants to pickup a package be sufficient? Example: Package is worth 200BTC so you take a 300BTC deposit on pickup and pay 310BTC on confirmed delivery.

I have a hunch that "robot wars" won't be a problem. If a robot is worth a lot more than a typical package or delivery fee then a small risk of damage would stop shenanigans. Robot theft/hijacking would probably be a slightly more challenging problem. Self destructing robots?

Only operators with the proper key can control the robots.

This will happen, imo.  Sooner or later.

Protecting packages won't be an issue.  If the technology exists to allow a robot to navigate through a complex urban field, then it will almost certainly have also some equipments to track/watch the package and prevent theft.  Also, nobody has to know how valuable is the package, and therefore random theft won't be lucrative.

Small flying drones already exist.  What we would need now is enough AI to allow those drones to fly from a address to another, while avoiding obstacles and such.  I think it will happen, but not in this century.

Adapt autonomous driving technologies. Google cars are already driving themselves, avoid obstacles, and such.

Then I guess it will be done soon.  The car will park in front of your house, will send you a SMS with code for opening the car's door and let you retreive the package.  Maybe Google is planning to do that.  Could be a very lucrative business.

I still think it's far from being ready for production, though.  Automated driving is still a very tough AI application.  It's a bit like voice to text application :  it has existed for years now, but it's still not much convincing.

No, they're already driving in traffic.

Doesn't prove anything.  It's still quite experimental.  And I assume Google cars are driving very slowly.

If it was already perfectly reliable we would see more of them.  There is a huge demand for companies for such an application.  They would save a lot on human drivers salary if they could just have robots drive their cars and trucks.

That's a false assumption, because they're driving on major Californian roads for thousands of miles.

Driving slower than traffic is quite dangerous.

Driving is something that few humans can do correctly. I think that small autonomous airplanes are the way to go. A fleet them would be awesome! :P

I am in flavor of crawler/roller/climber bot. I guess that's technically trespassing people's property, but I don't think humans will care if robots are doing "business" on the roof.

Even so, climbers would serve the division of labor of carrying packages to suitable location for pickup. Basically, such bot would hold up the package into the air and let the plane "snatch" it away without even having to land. It just need to be in a location where a plane doesn't crash into a wall or electrical lines.

One of the guys from google recently bought his own unmanned drone. Perhaps they are thinking along the same lines.

 :D

Luckily pizza delivery drivers dont get paid very much... I wonder if people would be more or less likely to tip properly? :D

Of course, but they'll have valuable parts presumably. And probably you could just swap out the brain chip if you had to.

what about the Skynet rule?

What about it? They're just a bunch of autonomous individual courier AIs, not a single mind

All this sounds like a hackers gold mine, i bet they can't wait for all this to start too.

Gold mine of what? If you want to connect to a courier bot, you need a key.

Fully homomorphic encryption would open the possibility of 100% autonomous robots.

The robots store Bitcoin private keys inside a fully homomorphically encrypted program.

Whenever the robot gets repaired or refuelled (by whoever feels like doing it - there is no central authority maintaining the robots), the robot rewards that person with a few BTC.

Of course the robot would require some unforgeable proof that it has been refuelled or repaired, before sending a BTC transaction. I'm not sure how this could be done.

The robots could also "earn" BTC by delivering stuff for people and getting paid.

Vandalism is discouraged, because if you destroy the robot the BTC stored in its memory are gone forever. Remember that simply copying the memory is useless because it's encrypted, and decryption is only possible by interacting with the robot.

This is wild science fiction.  Moreover, I doubt such autonomous robots would be a good thing.

Robots belong to people.  There is no point building a robot who belongs to no-one.  I also disagree about vandalism being discouraged.  If I had such a robot in front of me, I could destroy it, not for the bitcoins, but just for fun.  That's what vandalism is about : it is not theft, it is pure desctruction for the sake of destruction.

The only way to prevent vandalism would be to give robots some kind of rights, which is even wilder science fiction.

They would be the physical equivalent of open source software which also "belongs" to no one. 


The more BTC stored inside the robot, the smaller the chance of vandalism.

Destroying a "wealthy" robot for fun would be the equivalent of you  finding a safe on the street that you know has $100,000 inside it, and then dumping that safe in the ocean, just for fun.

Nope.  A software is immaterial.  It cost nothing to copy.  It's different in robotics, unless you build a self-reproductive robot.  Wild science fiction again.


If someone has really no hope in hopening the safe,  they would throw it for sure.

Plus, throwing a safe is certainly less fun than destroying a robot.

Open source software does belong to someone.  Copyright law has teeth here, http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1390172&rll=1 and without that protection there would be no copyleft, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

(Sorry to rant but IMHO "freedom" requires knowledge of & respect for the relevant laws.  :-[)


ISTR studies support this.  Nice, shiny cars parked in rough areas are less likely to be vandalised; possibly because people appreciate the cars' beauty.  Sorry I forget the references here.


If the safe is not beautiful, then "sour grapes" may take over.  :-\

Some does and some doesn't. There's plenty of open source software that is public domain.

No worries.  I remember this thread quite well and I enjoyed it.   Glad to have this kind of news.

Things will be even greater once we'll have pizza-delivering robocopters.

But indeed, a robocopter could be a nice way to deliver drugs as well.  And not just legal drugs :)

I was going to post this myself. If you combine cutting edge postal processing services, airport-grade package routing and bay distribution with automated drone network distribution, you can basically have one person put an envelope or parcel into a chute (could be you if you print out the sticker or barcodes yourself) and it comes out of the system directly onto someone's porch or building dronemail box.

Add in some variable tariffs, pay as you go, self-insurance options, and you get the fastest and cheapest global delivery network.