In the summer months of 2015, Jeffrey Schnapp and a few of his colleagues started collecting rideables. The hoverboard craze was in full swing, and OneWheels and Boosteds were showing up on roads and sidewalks. Schnapp and his co-founders rode, drove, and crashed everything they could find. For Schnapp, a Harvard professor and longtime technologist with a shaved head, pointy goatee, and a distinct Ben Kingsley vibe, this was market research.
A few months earlier, Schnapp had met with the leadership team at the Piaggio Group, maker of the Vespa and one of the world's largest mobility companies. His work as a cultural historian often brought Schnapp to Italy, where Piaggio is based. He met with a few folks for what he thought was coffee in Milan, but turned into a job interview. Piaggio made its plea: The 133-year-old company was struggling to keep up with the times. Ride sharing, the internet of things, self-driving cars---everything was changing around Piaggio, but "their feeling was that they weren't going to come up with really visionary and innovative answers within their company," Schnapp says. Piaggio needed a smaller, nimbler place, ideally one a little closer to the tech action than central Italy.
Initially, Schnapp conceived of this new project, called Piaggio Fast Forward, as a sort of internal think tank. That lasted all of one meeting, for which he convened a group of architects, artists, and technologists to dream big about the future of everything. "By the end of that I was pulled aside by the leadership of the company," Schnapp says. "We have a lot of good ideas, so forget the think tank. Let's build a company." He likes to call PFF a "Do Tank," part hands-on research and part for-profit manufacturer. They set up shop in an old Hood Dairy factory on a sleepy block in Boston, and went to work.
Despite all their rideable testing, and Piaggio's long heritage, the PFF crew quickly decided a human-moving vehicle wasn't yet for them. Not yet, anyway. "When we complete our family of vehicles, don't exclude it," Schnapp says. The team's first product is Gita, a round rolling robot that can carry up to 40 pounds of cargo for miles at a time. Rather than get you from A to B as fast as possible, it's meant to get you there more easily. More than that, Gita is a way to begin to explore what the world looks like when humans and robots share the sidewalk. And, hopefully, to make that idea seem a little less scary.
It's easy to forget now, but in Italy's post-WWII days the Vespa was a radical departure from anything that came before it. "It was... cheap and reliable," the BBC wrote in 2013, "while its step-through frame meant that women could ride it in skirts, and its concealed engine---tucked under the seat or over its small back wheel---kept oil, grease and dirt from chic Italian clothes." Its small, shifty body could weave through Rome's horrific traffic, and traverse unpredictable roads. "It was way more agile and nimble than almost all the vehicles that preceded it," Schnapp says. "It had to navigate rough pavement, medieval city streets, cobblestones."
For PFF, Gita development started with a simple goal: make a Vespa for the 21st century. That meant making something that helps people move around, and is designed entirely around real human needs. One need they discovered early was humans' need to look at their phones. They kept seeing people texting while riding a bike, or fiddling with delivery apps. "It really seemed like an interesting opportunity to create a vehicle that frees your hands," says Sasha Hoffman, PFF's COO, "that you don't have to think about as it moves through these spaces, and that does something for you."
They also liked the idea of building a vehicle that could follow you, rather than do its thing fully autonomously. It seemed less scary, not to mention easier than trying to teach the robot to stop and let an old lady go first. So Gita just does what you do. "In order to accustom people to a world where robots and humans are circulating together," Schnapp says, "it's highly useful to have human guides mediating that relationship."
Gita's not meant to be driven. Instead, you put on a wearable---right now a crazy-looking white toolbelt, but eventually something the size of a smartphone---and Gita will follow you around. The bot chases you as you walk or bike (it can hustle as fast as 22 miles per hour). You can lock the bot's cargo hold with your fingerprint, park it outside where it'll wait for you to come back, or roll it right up any ADA-compliant ramp and take it inside. It goes with you, turns with you, stops with you. Cameras on every side help it map the world and avoid obstacles. Its two tires and large tipped-over-cylinder design mean it has zero turning radius, and can move like you do. "It can do little ballerina pirouettes!" Schnapp says proudly.
Gita's job, simply put, is to carry your stuff. Schnapp and Hoffman refer to it as a sherpa, a pack mule, and a shopping cart. What that could lead to, on the other hand, is still the subject of some mystery. The PFF team has lots of ideas: It could help you carry groceries home, carry your bags as you shop, help shuttle supplies across a huge office or theme park. It could make it easier for elderly people to get around and still have the things they need close by. A mail carrier could release an army of Gitas to deliver to the whole block at once. PFF's exploring a system like a bike share, where you rent a Gita when you need it and return it when you're done. None of this is happening yet, or even necessarily possible. But there are lots of ideas.
After about a year of development, PFF launched Gita to the world in early February. But you can't buy one yet: the company's running limited pilots this year, then plans a bigger enterprise rollout in 2018. Consumer stuff will come... sometime after that. For now, Hoffman says PFF's working on perfecting the bot's driving skills, improving its computer vision and processing, and looking to testers to figure out what Gita might be great for.
The little guy already works pretty well. When I visited PFF, a yellow Gita was following Carlos Asmat, the company's lead software engineer, around the polished-concrete floors of the office. Asmat had a game controller in his hand, but rarely used it. Not even when I stepped in its path and Gita came to a quick halt. Hoffman says the product is basically finished, and PFF's job is now to scale up mass manufacturing. Not that she's worried about it: having a massive vehicle manufacturer as a parent company brings some peace of mind.
Gita's just the beginning for PFF, too. At their February launch event, the team also showed off Kilo, a larger model that can carry up to 250 pounds and looks a little like a spaceship. They're thinking about lots of other vehicles, including ones that probably look more like hoverboards and skateboards than little cargo robots. They're also interested in what happens when their bots have mapped more indoor and outdoor spaces, or when their cameras can recognize humans and objects. "You could set up a racing league in every shopping center with perfect point-cloud maps," Schnapp says, "or have Gitas colliding in a demolition derby. It's all good, as far as we're concerned." They're doubling the size of their office, and hiring as fast as they can. Piaggio's still footing the bill, and Schnapp says the bosses are thrilled with PFF's progress so far.
There's another way Gita is like the Vespa: it's not trying to be the only thing anyone needs. "We're not trying to beat Amazon or Uber or anybody else," Hoffman says. "Our vision of what the world will look like in ten years is that someone else will build the autonomous cars. Then there will be like 25 different types of lightweight transportation products, just kind of co-existing. And that's where we see Gitas roaming around." Each one a few feet behind its owner, obediently rolling along.
