Virginia Passes Law Allowing Robots to Deliver Straight to Your Door

Megalith

Megalith

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Does this mean that Virginians won’t have to tip for pizza delivery? Residents of the Old Dominion may be seeing an uptick in metal faces on their city sidewalks with the passing of legislation that makes robotic delivery possible. Now they just need to figure out that whole vandalism and theft thing.

Virginia has made robotics history. The commonwealth is the first state to pass legislation allowing delivery robots to operate on sidewalks and crosswalks across the state. The new law goes into effect on July 1 and was signed into law by the governor last Friday. The two Virginia lawmakers who sponsored the bill, Ron Villanueva and Bill DeSteph, teamed up with Starship Technologies, an Estonian-based ground delivery robotics company, to draft the legislation. Robots operating under the new law won’t be able to exceed 10 miles per hour or weigh over 50 pounds, but they will be allowed to rove autonomously. The law doesn’t require robots to stay within line of sight of a person in control, but a person is required to at least remotely monitor the robot and take over if it goes awry. Robots are only allowed on streets in a crosswalk.
 
The first thing I thought of was someone painting a digital penis on this thing, or just smashing it stealing the pizza and walking off.
 
And with this legislation they have just moved a step towards putting a ton of their citizens out of work.

These robots likely won't be built in Virginia either.
 
For a backwater state, that's actually impressive.
I'm sure the City's and counties will have there own rules.

Around here, when Halloween fell on a Sunday they made us hold all Halloween events on Saturday.
also till last year, no alcoholic beverages could be sold on Sundays.
 
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I love the thing about passing legislation "allowing" it... because if it's not allowed specifically by the state it must be illegal right?
 
Am I the only one that initially read the company that made the robot was Elbonian based, instead of Estonian? :D
 
Residents of the Old Dominion may be seeing an uptick in metal feces on their city sidewalks
 
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