on grocery shopping

it’s fucking ridiculous, stupid, and a waste of time.

I hope that by the time I’m old, the idea that I would spend 30+ minutes doing loop-de-loops and zig-zags through aisles in a pattern laid by the Wild Grocery Goose specifically so as to maximally distract me and waste more of my precious time will be considered insane and archaic. time I could spend doing whatever the fuck I want, instead of having to go on a damn scavenger hunt.

it’s 2020, damnit. these days, people call up food deliveries to their doorsteps with as little as 4 hours to a days’ notice, via the Magic Window technology. how is it that when you elect instead to drive yourself to the food warehouses, you must fend off brand distractions, ear-burrowing tinny pop songs, and a layout optimized for maximal similar item dispersion while you manually search for each in a pre-determined list of required provisions? it’s so fucking stupid.

a better solution? you arrive at the food warehouse in your vehicle. you bring as many bags as you want to carry. the bags are rented from RemoteGrocerCo, and are placed in slots on a robot in the stable. the robot already has your order. you’ve already typed/texted it into the website.

the thing scurries off, and you get a coffee or chill or listen to music or do whatever the fuck you want. 10 minutes later, or whatever, the thing comes back. you grab your bags (they come with made-to-order stickers - that’s easy). the first few times, you do a quick visual check to make sure the bot gets everything, but eventually you trust the Machine and begin to Let Go.

you take the bags and go on your merry way. the produce is kind of a random draw, but hey, the whole trip takes like 5 minutes sometimes, and that makes you want to go back whenever you crave a random snack.

obviously, this means that the stores no longer have to hire cashiers. all those shitty theft-susceptible self-checkout machines no longer have to be monitored. age-verification-dependent purchases can be pre-verified electronically. but your robots are basically the middle-men between the grocer and the consumer. so you arrange a special discount from the store, in exchange for the saved labor costs and enhanced security (this works just as well in Target). grocery stores begin to see a pattern off more frequent, smaller purchases, and this is great for supply chains.

the consumers pay standard subscription grocery-ordering fees. the value delivered is comparable to other such services, except that faster delivery is balanced by the need to drive to your local store.

the main challenge is technical in nature - you’d need to build a wheeled robot capable of quickly finding and packing objects from a list, without re-arranging the store. the thing would first need to scan every item from the shelves. this requires gps-less fine location tracking (probably some kind of semi-supervised model which monitors visual cues and wheel positions) and perhaps one or two grasping claws capable of fine motor control and propioception. this technical hurdle is, no doubt, the reason no such system currently exists.

what’s the state of the art in robotic hands?