A robot delivery idea so crazy it just might work | Hard Reset
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About our video: McNuggets delivered in under 10 min for just $1? This underground Prime-like delivery service is the closest thing humans have to teleportation.
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We drive everything everywhere - for each food order we place or package we order, it takes miles and manpower to get to us. But what if there was a simpler, more sustainable solution? Pipedream Labs has created a technology that’s the closest to teleportation we’ll ever get.
Small, electric robots could make near-instant delivery possible, and for a much lower cost and environmental impact than current methods. Utilizing underground tunnels, the robots would drop your delivery into a dedicated box in your home.
The company’s idea to build a network of tubes would allow direct delivery right into your home, for far less time and money than even Prime 2-day shipping.
00:00 This is a tube that grants wishes
01:48 Welcome to Hard Reset
03:23 Follow us to Pipedream Labs in Austin, Texas
04:02 Building a city-wide network of tubes
04:55 Pipedream Labs’ prototype graveyard
06:30 Last-mile logistics is expensive and car-dependant
09:16 Pipedream could make mail delivery safer
09:51 The engineering problems with Pipedream
11:30 How Pipedream is testing tube tech in Georgia
12:55 Here’s how these pipes are installed
14:30 Pipedream’s in-house prototype of this tech
17:50 Pipedream’s long-term plan
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Read more of our stories on last-mile logistics:
Autonomous tech is taking over last-mile delivery
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Solving the last mile problem with robotic delivery vehicles
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Delivery drones are now dropping off packages for Walmart
► www.freethink.com/consumer-te...
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finally I got to learn how this awesome voice belongs to
I know one of the founders of Muse. Very smart, very cool lady.
Omg if You like Avatar the air bender.. Bruhhhhh
There is a similiar project in switzerland called cargo sous terrain, but on a much larger scale. It uses bigger tubes, larger vehicles and aims to connect cities and big businesses via underground transport. The lawmakers already implemented the necessary changes and many big swiss companies are invested in the project. To be fair, in siwtzerland they do have to build tunnels all the time anyway, in order to get anything anywhere.
Politicians from other countries should learn from the swiss ones
so, a subway, a tried and true transport method
Im sure in Switzerland, it will be built successfully. In the U.S., the Politicians will have to get their percentage of kickbacks and the Unions will spend most time on breaks so that the job goes 100 years past the time when it was supposed to be finished and several trillion over budget all on tax payers pockets
@@chrxmeface wait for robots to automate construction, and ai to automate politics. boom, max efficiency
If something gets stuck, the maintenance man gonna cuss like crazy
i suspect the maintenance man will be a maintenance robot. now if the maintenance robot gets stuck...
we send another one 😎
@@juzeus9I think there was a Star Trek TNG episode about this
@@moshimoshibar exocomps?
“Let’s give Bezos a tunnel to your bedroom”
He doesn't need one, yet.
I pictured Bezos big head all the sudden peaking from a hole in the wall with a big smile lol
Wait until bro finds out about a pad lock
I was hoping he could sneak in and read me bedtime stories.
Thing is we have drones
Switzerland is building a network of underground narrow tunnels for deliveries but more on an industrial scale than a private one
And just like the idea in this video the Swiss Cargo Sous-Terrain sounds cool at first until you have a look at the realistic cost / benefit of it. Then you start seeing that just improving existing systems like rail for long-distance and shared mobility for short distances will be so much better.
someone looked at itemducts in modded minecraft and was like, you know what, i can do that in real life
ahahah nice ref
Or Odd squad on PBS
The closest to the teleportation is falling asleep on a flight
that is exactly how it would feel i reckon lol, maybe airliners and co should offer a sleeping gas to customers on a flight and advertise it as 'feels like teleportation!'
@@JTheoryScience it would be a nightmare for the fda though lmao, stores in airports selling sleeping pills (which i think is already a thing) might sound better to them
(BILLION DOLLAR IDEA) Airlines: "Hey... we can stack human bodies more efficiently in an airplane if people are asleep!" HERE COMES THE SLEEPY GAS!
I had an idea exactly like this when I was a little kid, and I thought it was just so genius. Only difference was my idea was on a much smaller scale, basically a pneumatic tube going from the mailbox to the inside of your house so you didn't have to leave the house to get the mail in the winter
Hey! I’m the guy who stuffed an entire donut in my mouth 15:48 and built the network in Georgia. Feel free to ask any questions!
What do you think about developing this system and licencing it out to other parts of the world? Different cities might have different requirements. The physical parts of such a system could be made by any manufacturer, when it is standardized.
@@thx9977 That’s definitely one of the ways we think of getting the technology out into the world. Similar to how internet is spread, we develop the technology and others can be the one putting it in your home. It’s gonna be a massive challenge getting this everywhere the way we want it to be, but that’s just part of the fun :)
Have you guys designed any systems that’s targeting apartments/multifamily buildings? Like just for in building deliveries like a dumbwaiter lift. I live in a large apartment building and the number 1 problem we have is the overflowing packages that’s taking up all the lockers and lobby spaces. My building management had since knocked down 3 rooms and redone an office room to try to accommodate but it’s still loose packages everywhere and people’s stuff gets lost sometimes. I feel like if you guys can marketing it to luxury buildings as a storage/concierge solution. With them you can make some money to further the company and I bet they will be able to provide yall with plenty of interior design models and field data
Oh yea and office buildings to to deliver mails and stuff
15:46; I just wanted to say that this really does seem like a great idea and although I'm sure there's tons of hurdles, the payoffs seem worth the investments. All the best!
This is an awesome thought. Lots of questions to be answered along the way (examples: what about apartments?, what happens when a robot fails?, is it secure enough for medicine and banking? is is too hot/cold/dirty for certain perishables?, how well will it scale?). It also has a ton of potential to improve our lives (less trucks clogging city streets, faster access to goods, easier returns, easier access to goods especially for the elderly and wheelchair users). Whether it actually becomes a reality or not, it's fantastic to see people punching holes to get outside the box we often get stuck in.
I think it could get very reliable, like almost no fails, and it would be such a cheap service compared to nowadays delivery system that it would have a fairly good margin to afford warranty politic. My bet is that this WILL happen, and after it starts, it will get better and better very fast. I don't know when this will happen but i believe it will.
the system needs to be installed in a New Apartment building, with a location in the parking garage for delivery drivers to load to the individual apartments. It can then be upgraded to a city wide system. make sure the largest pizza can be delivered . 😎
Porch pirates will adapt to be "pipe pirates"
lol They'll train ferrets to go into the tunnels and retrieve packages for them.
@hed420 lol most of them arent sophisticated. They trip often while running away with packages
@@hed420 or other robots, excepts their cameras in the tubes
@@hed420they're famously not smart
All you gotta do is open up the maintenance hatch and swipe them as they slow down for curves
I think you would soon wish you had bigger tubes. How would you maintain them or retrieve robots when they break or run off the rails? Can you keep animals out? Could people traffic drugs via tubes? How do you increase capacity in the future? Home industry could be facilitated by these tubes too. Order some Aluminum, when it arrives, machine it into parts and send the parts to someone else, etc. The idea has merits.
they really should make the pipes split in the middle and place them under hollow sidewalks, that way, when something inevitability clogs the tube, you could easily just lift up the concrete slab from the sidewalk, unbolt the top section of the tube off and remove the clog. It's a lot more infrastructure work but you'd at least get to run water-mains, gas and electricity all in the same hole...
It's cool but not good on a small personal scale. The cost and energy required to build all the tubes with rails would be enormous. Above-ground rail for longer distances with a transition to aerial transit over short neighborhood distances would be much better. Small autonomous electric ground vehicles will soon do this same thing everywhere with no infrastructure adjustments. So this underground rail option is only good for very high frequency needs over very short distances.
Good point you could get drugs delivered too...now I'm definitely on board. In all seriousness drugs are the least concern, they are valuable enough people are happy to drive.
@@Mavrik9000Indeed, but very high frequency over short distance IS our reality. At least in (dense) cities. Basically everyone is having stuff in and out all the time, and it would dramatically increase and replace more traditional ways if this was implemented. I mean, people would have even more stuff delivered vs go and buy, you’d send stuff to other people, there would be more rental services, second hand services… Not overnight, but in the medium to long term. Today I can already see delivering vans and trucks in my street all the time… So it would pay off. My guess.
@@brunosco Imagine installing street-size sewer mains to every address with rail tracts inside them. Then add in all the intersections and switching equipment. It's an enormously complex system and prohibitively expensive. In new developments where they put multiple utilities in the same chamber or tunnel, it might be feasible, not to every location but instead only to central hub locations.
Americans need... Donuts delivered directly to their gobs, without leaving the chair/bed. Awesome idea!
😂
Yeah, and Europeans ice cream. 😅 It would have bad consequences for some. 😁
@@brunosco Europeans are sooooo much fatter than us Yanks 💪😲🤣🤣🤣
Hot donuts!
they drive normally ... not much better
I've said for a while that municipalities should be managing holes in the ground and leasing them out to various utility companies. I was mostly thinking in terms of telecommunications but small robo-trains could make sense as well.
I think this is cool in concept, but probably requires building too much infrastructure to be worth the investment. And it really only lends itself to high-density, urban environments. I think drones are a more practical solution to moving mail and deliveries around without the use of cars
Yeah, drones can carry the lightest and the $20k Tesla bot humanoids can work in pairs to carry any other weight to any other place.
Exactly
They'd need air traffic controllers just for drones if everybody used them. Imagine all the drones they would need for New York City, who want's to see a drone every time they look up. Besides, they might scratch the paint on my flying car.
@@charlestaylor3195The entire DJI drone network can sense other drones. It’s like self-driving cars on a 3 dimensional level.
Or, you know, a truck? We already have enough noise pollution, the last thing we need is a constant stream of drone buzzing.
Sounds like a great way to give possums and raccoons direct access to your house.
To solve the issue of waste and things, you could have different containers for different items. A blue bin for recycling, a red bin for hazardous waste like batteries. Hell, this could replace garbage trucks - rarely do you have huge things to throw out, it’s just napkins or random bits and pieces. You could have a bin just like a trash can but send it away in the tube and it goes right to a garbage center
I like the idea of using it to return items. Specially, if foods were sent in durable containers that could be washed and used again.
Haha. Your comment made me realize how many people would put their dirty dishes in this thing rather than running a dishwasher, especially if they don't already have one... I guess it could be as good as a dishwasher if someone runs an Amazon style service that washes your dishes and returns them clean.
@@devon9075 I was mostly thinking of glass soda bottles, glass milk jugs, etc. but yeah that would be an awesome service!!
*this. dishwasher. laundry. garbage, compost, recycling. everything... imagine the boost to gifting (freecycle/free stuff on craigslist) lots of things i've wanted to get but couldn't see driving 5 miles for a $3 item*
Having a tube going to every house sounds expensive, but if there would be boxes within a few hundred meters of your house, where stuff could be delivered automatically and very cheaply would be already nice. Would maybe spawn home appliance etc. rental business, when you wouldn't have to buy rarely needed items. Just rent them for a few euros a brief time and receive within an hour and return the same way.
Totally!
the initial cost is crazy expensive, but the operating cost if incredibly lower to normal delivery. (not to mention that it would be faster and more realiable ).
This kind of inferstructure is so expensive and difficult to build but it could be super economical if implimented in somewhere like new york and lasted for a long time.
In New York especially you could maybe even bolt a pipe underneath bridges or subway lines. Would eliminate a huge amount of drilling
We can’t even figure out underground powerlines in most places and they expect us to believe municipal governments will support mini subways for Amazon packages?
It is a good idea though, instead of drones
Maybe Bezos billions might fund these networks, would be for the public good but he would have a massive head start and recoup the costs over decades with fees
Hey it might not work, but we’re going to try to get funding for the next decade
So how does plumbing work then?
@@jackwilliamburgess the pressurized 6 inch diameter water mains or the 1.5 in diameter supply to each house… aren’t cheap and every house needs them to be a livable dwelling. Sewer is cheaper but tends to have vermin and filth and flood waters and roots growing in it… not exactly a good place for your robot to swim through with your McDonald’s order.
Great concept; difficult to execute. Definitely a pipe dream, but also quite possible. All the best!
💯
For the first half of this video I was thinking I don't want this! I want some friction between my deciding I want something and actually buying it. For the second half where they start to consider the implications of having quick access (not necessarily buying) to stuff we want, I'm in. All those tools and equipment I have that I rarely use can be shared or rented just by putting it in a drawer. I love it!
This seems an obvious next step for delivery. I really like the idea of storing your own physical items in the "cloud" just like data, or accessing shared items almost instantly. Very cool. 😊
A great proving ground could be the next to last mile, connecting warehouses on the edge of major metro areas to micro distribution centers in neighborhoods. That could eventually connect to every house.
you've now sold me on muse. I've been reading into it's uses within vr applications, and now you've mentioned it in a _totally_ different field. Thank you for sharing your story of muse!
This video is 1 parts inspiring, 1 parts cool, and 998 parts Meme/Joke material. Infinite donut drawer lol.
A year or two ago I saw a TikTok from what I think was one of the founders of this company talking about this idea. At the time everyone in the comments was calling this a long-shot idea that had no hope of succeeding. It's great to see that they're still around and making real progress with this.
Even if this isn't for long haul, I think its really cool. If means that a post office kind of place in an area can take deliveries and send it through a neighborhood or two (5-50 houses) its pretty cool. Apartments also feel like a good place for this (going up as well of course). Better than the front office stealing your mail...
I had this idea 6 years ago, for elderly living facility in a closed environment. All the elderly lives in seperate places and get deliveries from tubes
Instead of individual underground pipes going directly to each house, a much more efficient and cost-effective approach is building neighborhood distribution delivery centers. Centralizing the pipes in these centers would make it convenient for everyone to collect their deliveries by simply walking to the center.
3:38 Me: look away for a second. Video: Hi I'm Nick ... Cannon... Mind: they got Nick Cannon ... Me: look back ..ohhhh. 😅😅😅.
This need more likes 😂😂😂
At first I was like, why do consumers need instant gratification for impulse purchases. Then I remembered all brick and mortar close at 11pm. My child got extremely sick at midnight the other night and the only option was a gas station or the ER for medicine...
It's disgusting that with such a cool concept, everybody is making negative "what ifs" that are so easily solvable if you have an IQ above 95.
Awesome concept and something I would happily install at home and connect to. How would you stop people on the receiving end from sending garbage or dangerous items back through the tunnels. You could easily end up with a waste problem that then has to be addressed and issues with oversized items being jammed into it. It almost needs a sealable capsule with a sensor that has to be closed and the sensor knows its sealed it fits back through the tube. Also if you did have service pits similar to sewerage, porch pirates etc would likely start breaking into those to take stuff as well.
Or eventually people living in all the tubes and crawling into houses.
They have sewer pipe everywhere, it's not totally idiot proof, but close to it. We're gonna need some more plumbers though, for when the tubes get jammed.
I guess there would be some additional robots specifically designed to police and address those issues. Similar to the streets where people (police, security people, service people) deal with whatever issue arises, robots would do it in the tubes, autonomously or remotely controlled. Those problems wouldn’t appear overnight, I guess, so there would be time for such special robots to be developed and deployed alongside the main ones.
Yeah people can put bugs in there on purpose and cause chaos
I mean mail delivery used to be done by pneumatic tubes all throughout the city long ago, so this isn't exactly new. It was dangerous and expensive to maintain. So we got rid of that and moved to driver mail. This might be easier to maintain than the pneumatic tubes though. A tube system would be cool though, and faster.
But wouldn't be a drone based system better since there is no need for infrastructure ? Imagine having to dig up everything to put in the tube with a drone you dont need it.
London used to have small underground trains just to move mail from one post office to another throughout the city.
@@kilian42 Except drones get attacked by birds and have trouble in inclement weather. Drones are cool, but aren't practical for deliveries, at least non consistently. That said, this system is even more impractical.
@@kilian42 safety hazard too. I've heard someone else that was doing drones commercially say they were doing well into their insurance asked "You're fly how much weight over peoples heads?"
@@kilian42Some commented here on some of the drone issues. But what about robots using the pavement? I think this exists already. Still, that wouldn’t solve the “last inch” portion, where the stuff gets into your house.
Very interesting idea, reminds me a little of the vacuum-tubes they used to have in offices. Wonder how they would deal with higher volumes, we only see one cart driving but what if its hundreds, how would that scale. Looking at how vulnerable trains are how you gonna prevent a nightmare gridlock underground. Also, that one delivery Van is a lot more environmentally friendly than 100+ people individually driving up to the shops and back home. The better option would be if people would walk / take the bike to the shops, but that means properly designed cities for humans instead of cars. Buying less shit would also help....
This.
This is one of the most exciting videos I've seen in ages! What a brilliant idea, from such a bold and impressive little startup. If I could invest in it (or be part of it), I totally would. I really hope to see this come to life within my lifetime 😀
Why not help implement it in your area? Work with them and be active at your level… Pretty bold, but why not? I’m telling this to myself too! 😄
"I need a person and a two-ton car to deliver 6 chicken nuggets to me" The entitlement of the average middle-class person is really stunning these days (not excluding myself). How about designing cities in such a way that we can reach stores and restaurants by walking or biking a few minutes? Then we could maybe pick the chicken nuggets up ourselves? 🤔
Yup this is a pipe-dream (hehe) of techbro car dependent suburbanites who can't imagine living in a walkable community. Absolutely bonkers
Or just make your own food (wow, revolutionary!)
Yes, but the reality is that people in cities today have things delivered to them regularly. Plus, you could do additional things like sell or rent an object by sending it easily to someone else across the city. And maybe an access to every house or building would be overkill, maybe that could be like one collect point per block, like the places I’m already having my stuff delivered to these days.
Honestly this could change the world. Seems like a pipedream to make happen but all the use cases listed at the end are game changing.
I could see this being a feasible option for eco new build: if the buildings deal with their own graywater, you could use this to transport the "output" of composting toilets to a central facility. That way you'd only need to install the same number of pipes as a normal building. And yeah, I would love to live in a small apartment where I have access to a massive library of shared tools, instruments etc. within a few minutes. That would be awesome, and so much more sustainable!
Pump liquid is hugely energy efficient. I guess the problem is that sewage system carries low concentration (in organic matter) water. If every apartment had a Food Waste Grinder and every building a system for pre treatment, it could generate reuse water for the entire building, and let the concentrate sewage flows to a treatment plant to produce methane for electricity generation and bio fertilizer.
"Why are you pooping in that drawer?" "Don't worry about it, I'm saving the planet"
sewage? we already transport waste
Best pipedream labs video I've seen so far
“Product pipes bring your food in, poop pipes bring your food out”
I had the same overall idea a long time ago, and thus I must agree that it is a good idea 🙂 I didn't think about using it to store stuff, and that's a great idea. Most of what I have in my room isn't needed often and I'd be okay with waiting 15 minutes or more, to get the part or tool I need in exchange for getting rid of clutter. You said that they gave a lot of thoughts to the pipe size and settled for 18", but I think it's too limiting, the cost of digging a trench for a 36" pipe wouldn't be much greater, obviously the pipe would cost more, but the usefulness of a larger diameter would become obvious once such a transportation network becomes the main mode of transportation. And it doesn't prevent sending smaller loads into the home, while sending larger loads to a collection box in the lobby or at the nearest intersection. The usefulness of a larger pipe can't be underestimated. There are many challenges in the way, flooding is one, piracy is another, and of course, mechanical failures. Nothing insurmountable though. It may sound disturbing at first, but I would go as far as suggesting simply upgrading the existing sewer and storm drain systems to have them double as transportation pipes. These pipes spend a lot of time mostly empty anyway.
I spoke about this same idea with my father in detail a few years back. I'm glad to have it validated
You could also "ship out" waste.
I really wish these guys success, but I doubt it will work. So many potential problems: small animals, gas leaks, flooding, earthquakes causing damage to the rails, deliberate sabotage etc etc. Maybe it works on a smaller scale within commercial facilities or something like that.
Aren’t these already issues with things like sewage, gas, water, electricity etc?
I love this idea, hope it works out!
Might as well run a fiber optic cables in the pipe and include hight speed internet as part of the deal !
The items sharing part is incredible. Also once house robots will be a thing, if you forget something at home you can just tell your robot to send it through the tube
Could it drastically reduce single use packaging? For fast food and drinks, send it in reusable dishes that keep things hot and cold. Just return it to the point of origin to be washed and reused.
I think instead of rails... Round carrier vehicle with 5 wheels all around the diameter will be much cheaper and efficient. No extra cost of rails. Can go any direction even up.
the real question is what would this look like to scale, like what amount of trips would it replace, and how many of these robots can you put in the tube before it backs up? There should be a prioritization system in place so things like your mail or routine deliveries can go out at off peak times, but food can be high priority and be prioritized for one hour delivery etc. You will really want to maximize the amount of deliveries you can make with each tube, and you will want redundancy so if one tube breaks it can go to another tube, and they can flow in both directions. Interested in this, but need to see more questions answered to know how it will scale and what its reliability is in test models. A pilot would be needed.
I love the idea but how do we regulate what gets sent back. 99.99% chance that someone sends a poop bomb back to pipedream HQ, or figures out a way to catastrophically damage the system with just a stick and some spare parts.
Hi from Greece. Nice idea. If a country decides to build a smart city from scratch then they should absolutely adopt this.
6:40 I have a solutoin to the high "last-mile" cost: There could be pick-up points where people can get their package themselves, while they are shopping groceries. There could even be offices specialized for packages, perhaps even for post.
They already know your idea will work. And better. They want to erode citizen privacy and normalize consumerism to your jobless, starving children. In cyberpunk genre, this is called, "The Feed"...
The biggest obvious problem is flooding. These pipes would have to be air-tight throughout.
this is a great idea and it would fix many traffic problems
Gives 'the internet of things ' a different meaning 😂
Don’t underestimate how much damage rats can do to such an underground pipe system… Rats will bite through the box holding foods, rats will bite the electrical cables….
Sorry, but I don't see how it would be plausible to install into every home. Best scalable solution would be to have multiple public parcel lockers that refills/send automaticly using undergraund tubes. Those lockers could be placed in most sensible spots over the city to cover most homes. Not so convenient as getting package directly into your kitchen, but more realistic for sure.
this could make food way cheaper. make it in bulk it automated kitchens then send it to 10s of thousands of homes a day with these delivery systems. Easily lowers costs by like 70-80%. No more cooking needed ever again.
It's all tubes and games until a tree finds a way in or a flood from a heavy storm fills the tube with gunk, stopping all deliveries along at that line.
I do love this idea. Bandwidth would be a huge bottleneck. The main “tube” would have to carry thousands of bins, plus the bins would need to be sent back for other deliveries. I think apartment/condo buildings this concept is very viable. I also wonder if there would be a downside of more consumption due to the additional convenience.
As a retired plumber of over 20 years, I had a similar, actually the exact same idea back when Obama was President. I even wrote a government agency asking about it, but never heard back, and I never pursued the idea..... I hope this pipe dreams succeeds!
I'm all for the 'Star Trek' level, tubular is the way. That said, having done last mile deliver with the Teamsters for a year, I did love the job (mostly). It made me some cash and I finally caught up on 200 audiobooks I wanted to ingest. :)
Seems pretty cool, I would definitely have this for any future cities being built
This is incredible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can see it in places with proper urban density like NYC or asian cities. then have it set up like a amazon locker where you have a centralized location at your building. But setting up a input output location in every house seems far fetched.
I could see underground logistics systems can help with creating walkable cities or communities.
this looks very similar to what Philip Jose Farmer described in his Dayworld trilogy, and I'm all here for it.
"You magnificent bastard." Made me laugh. Very cool concept, I'm interested in how this scales and how intersecting pipes that can go in different directions / destinations rather than a single pipe.
i really love the idea, but i can't help but wonder how this system would deal with the huge amounts of traffic needed, will the pipes even be long enough to queue all the deliveries needed?
just one more lane . . .
I think one network with two lane traffic would already accommodate a lot, then later on more lanes could be added if needed. (Same as with Elon Musks’ Boring Company and Loop project)
you could accomodate packages in a "train" formation, with optmized delivery paths calculated by AI or other mathematical algorithm. Another crazy idea could be like some sort of "key transfer locations", imagine train A carry 3 packages, you could make it "detach" one of the packages on this "key location" where another train, lets say train B reattachs the package to deliver it in another place according to and optmal path. This kind of already happens with long airplane travels, a plane take you to a coutnry, and another plane take you out from there, and so on.. There's a lot of room to improve and think about this pipe delivery concept. If this is ever implemented, i think it will be very simple with a lot of problems at the start but it would drastically improve given enough time.
I was thinking about people stealing food orders....It's improbable to have one installed into every single apartment unit. However the foyer could house several. And there could be a one time code delivered via text 5 minutes before delivery. The code could open a lock on the drawer that has the delivery. this would be a brilliant solution. Would probably add thousands to the cost of each home or apartment building. You would have to spread the cost of the infrastructure over time, into the cost of each home, and possibly each business, using the tunnels. The power infrastructure has been subsidised by electricity and connection costs....they'll do the same here with delivery fee's and access to the system.
This could potentially work between a logistics center and local pickup parcel lockers, which exist in a manageable number (home addresses are too numerous)
Can't wait for the Adam Something episode about this. EDIT: OK, I watched the video. It's actually a pretty cool idea with exciting implications. It's just gonna be quite hard to implement.
This has huge implications for better city planning, making residential and commercial areas more walkable without the need for huge delivery vehicle infrastructure. I like i! Obviously this is a super hard sell for existing neighbourhoods, but get it up and running in NEW developments so that it goes on the radar of the general public in a positive way, and the will might start coming forward to expand into existing communities.
I went to school with Canon. Amazing guy and even amazing-er brain!
@@CanonReeves-xb3qx got an immediate test case in Australia, where can I order one of the units?
*it's not a dump truck, it's a series of tubes*
"you magnificent bastard" rofl. May the design gods be with you
Wow! I really hope this is a reality. It has a lot of potential.
Tucker should make a Pokémon like donut journey. Where he needs to get every single donut type from that neighborhood, city, even country.
I thought of this idea when I was seven years old, watching my mom cash her check at the bank and putting her check into the tube. Thinking why can’t we have tubes going to everyone’s home to deliver food and packages like we do our water.
As an engineer I don't think this will ever work. Most cities are so congested underground that these will never fit......
Reusable boxes saves packaging, reduces waste, cheaper, faster, etc... I like it. But it will be very difficult to implement such massive infrastructure.
The biggest barrier I see is Tote retention. Unless you can instantly retrieve the tote you'll quickly run out of Totes to deliver stuff with. Modern fulfillment systems use recirculation to put totes back into rotation. But delivery like this means you can't do that. For me the answer is cardboard. You need to press a rigid enough paperboard that it can be stored and manipulated but doesn't require any retrieval later because the customer will just recycle it on their end.
Make most totes non removable without a tool or key. That way people only retrieve the contents.
Go a step further, and you got yourself Futurama pipes to transport people.
Donut move was wild, you don't even know whose they were, they weren't open, you didn't ask, just freaking weird...
It's just a 21st century version of the pneumatic tube system that we thought would be everywhere back in the 60s. Cool idea, but placing all the tunnels will cost a fortune, and what do you do if something gets stuck?
but what about city centers, the only difference between these pipes and water and such pipes, is there can only be one wagon supplying one customer at a time. So what about apartments would they need bigger pipes, more pipes or a "per building-hub" at the bottom receiving these packages and then sending them on their way up the building. And back to the original question wouldnt these pipes need multiple pipes in dense areas, liquid pipes solve this by nature because its a liquid, therefore just increase the size and pressure a bit to accommodate higher demand. If theres more demand with these pipes they would have to increase the size loads to fit extra tracks. Though they could increase the speed of the wagons, but this not only needs more logistic computation, it also wouldnt work because of the wagons needing to turn everywhere. I understand they would mimic train logistics with a track going each direction, but the wagons dosent seem the have the same ability to switch tracks like trains, neither do they carry more than one "cargo" at a time. overall this will probably be rolled out in urban areas much sooner than dense areas due to these hurdles, but i believe there is some sort of solution its just gonna take time and refinement of the system.
Right because the energy to tunnel tubes to every house, and maintain them certainly would be cheaper than just driving stuff around with efficient evs.
Cool idea 💡, but it’s a pipe dream, imagine flood or gas leak entering directly into your kitchen or rodent, pest, etc…
How about if something toxic/combustable is spilled, or there is a fire. Or people intentionally sabotage to break. What if someone puts a garden hose into their hole. How easy to fix? Theft issues? Drone deliveries make more sense to me.
I was thinking the same thing. It's going to be insanely expensive not just to install but to maintain a system like this.
What do you guys do when a flood makes your sewer overflow? And someone creative could allready send a self destruct submarine down your sewer pipe today.... I don't see new problems that we don't allready have with the current piping. The fact that nobody blew up your local gas pipe yet doesn't mean that this new thing is more dangerous. It just means that there are a lot less terrorists in the world than you might believe
@@caigenproject the problem is that there's no back pressure to stop things from getting in. In the hose example you could sure just put some drainage holes in the pipes and call it a day but it wouldn't stop roaches from making their little kingdom in there. Having a hole were a ps5 could come in from is neat but it also means anything the size of ps5 could easily get into the system and break it... it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me because you'd only really be destroying the experience for your neighborhood at a maximum and not bringing the whole system down, but it's a issue nonetheless.
That all sounds pretty solvable. If you don't like cratures, replace the oxygen in the pipes with some inert gas. And a correct double door locking system should ensure that you can't shove hoses or that kind of nonsense in there. Nothing is unbreakable offcourse. But if we are going to not develop stuff because people might break it. Than we can call it quits and never launch anything new again.
Amazing! 😃 I’d love to see this implemented where I live (Europe). Makes me want to do it here… I hope it wouldn’t be just for donuts, though. 😛 (Also ice cream - just kidding, but ice cream magic delivery for sure would be a strong temptation for me!)
I don't understand how this will work if theres 50 people on a street ordering and only 1 tube going through the street - wouldn't they all get backed up behind each other?
I'm just thinking what if this system is on a water pipe? Water pressure would push the parcels. Parcels would be in seald bags anyway. Then highly specific mechanical hooks would be installed to a specific address. Maybe it is much cheaper but a lot harder.😅
This is cool but not good on a small personal scale. The cost and energy required to build all the tubes with rails would be enormous. Above-ground rail for longer distances with a transition to ariel transit over short neighborhood distances would be much better.
The people who come up with this stuff have never shook hands with a plumber. Their ideas exist in a vacuum.
There was a Kickstarter-funded short film called "Skywatch" that portrayed something like this
Awesome video and great think project! Big hurdles to show the audience this isn't just a 'pipe dream' Is to mention a rough economic model pathway to reality (sorry someone had to mention the elephant in the room) and then they have to show how the system scales to everyone actually using these for everything imaginable; how well these tubes deal with that type of two-way traffic? It's all fuzzy nice feeling saying "like the Internet" but even the Internet has had various upgrades to each cable and node to allow wider bandwidth; this system has a hard-limit (determinable by software modelling) off deliveries per hour. It would be great to partner with software modelling buffs to show what actual scale is possible, and how will the system need to have adapting to handle traffic and bottlenecks.