You could have a robot wink at you on your next run or walk. Recently, the Arlington County released a small fleet of robots—complete with eyes that can wink or display hearts—into the wild as part of a 20-day pilot program between the county and a company called Kiwibot. Originally intended as food delivery robots, the robots are rolling around parts of Rosslyn and Ballston to check for faults in the sidewalks.
What are the robots doing?
The robots will spend their days rolling along approximately 45 linear miles of sidewalks, mostly in high density areas like Ballston and Rosslyn, as part of a pilot program ahead of the next sidewalk assessment in 2028. The hope is that the bots might be a more efficient way of surveying the sidewalks for faults like cracks and missing bricks, according to Aidan Shakespeare, who’s part of the engineering team at Arlington County’s Water Sewer Streets Bureau.
Each robot is able to survey about five miles a day. They’re not just scooting around aimlessly, Shakespeare says. They’ve been programmed ahead of time with a specific route and are taking copious photos and using a kind of laser technology called LiDAR to scan the sidewalks along the way.
“In the grand scope of things, five miles a day does kind of sound slow,” he says,“But if you put a person out there with a phone and a rollie stick to survey the streets, I think you’d probably be making about the same progress in a day.”
Who thought of this?
This pilot program in Arlington was inspired by a similar partnership between the DC Department of Transportation and Kiwibot to survey the sign inventory in Navy Yard. “We heard about them. We heard about their robots. We were very interested in their capabilities,” Shakespeare says. “Eventually, it all worked itself out. We liked each other, and we entered the program.”
Aren’t the robots kind of defenseless?
The robots come with a GPS locator that makes them pretty difficult to steal or otherwise mess with. Kiwibot also has human teams stationed nearby the robots to help them should they send out a distress signal, according to Shakespeare.
These robot babysitters are also around in the event a bot goes topsy turvy since they don’t have arms to lift themselves back up. But Shakespeare says that it’s unlikely they’ll flip over since they’re quite low to the ground and relatively agile.
Does this mean robots are coming to replace us all?
Not necessarily, the county is still waiting to see what kind of data the robots are able to gather.“We’re always interested in pursuing new technology, especially if we think it’s going to help our efficiency,” says Shakespeare. “We’re not necessarily opposed to using people, and we’re also not set on using robots in the future. We’re just kind of experimenting with it right now.”
