Gita the robot is essentially a glorified shopping cart that’s more expensive than it is impressive.
My mother never drove to the supermarket. She’d just stroll down the street with a little pushcart and return an hour later with a week’s worth of groceries. She didn’t need a car for that. And certainly not a robot.
But a little company in Boston called Piaggio Fast Forward thinks a robot is exactly what people like my mother have always needed. So it built one, called gita, a two-wheeled machine designed to follow its human owner while carrying the person’s packages. In other words, an automated grocery cart.
Mama would have gotten quite a kick out of gita. So did I, as I strolled the streets of Brockton with this blinking, whirring robot at my heels. For awhile there, I was the most popular guy in town, as other pedestrians peppered me with questions.
Yes, it can carry about 40 pounds of stuff. It rolls along at up to 6 miles per hour. The battery lasts for about four hours, and it can even play music from your smartphone through its front-mounted Bluetooth speaker.
But interest faded when they asked the most sensible question of all — how much? The answer is: too much. As in, $3,300.
For a grocery cart.
Of course, gita is so much more than that to Piaggio Fast Forward’s cofounder Greg Lynn. He’s an architect, not an engineer, and for him gita is an exercise in urban planning. Millions of Americans seek out homes that are an easy walk away from shopping, said Lynn. Then they end up driving to the store anyway because they need a way to bring their purchases home. Gita can solve this problem by replacing the car, or at least the trunk of the car, during those short jaunts to the supermarket or the public library.
“It’s much more about a local lifestyle and changing your relationship with your neighborhood,” Lynn said.
Unlike many other self-propelled robotic machines, gita doesn’t use radars, laser rangefinders or GPS to find its way. Instead, gita’s front-mounted cameras take a good look at you when you press the start button. It’s not memorizing your face, but your entire body — your size and shape, and even the color of the clothes you’re wearing.
Now turn your back on the robot and start walking. Gita will remember you. It speeds up or slows down when you do, and follows as you turn left or right. You’ve got to remember to use those wheelchair curb cuts when crossing streets. But, if you break into a run, gita won’t even try to keep up; its top speed is 6 miles per hour.
Like an old-school Segway scooter, the 50-pound robot balances on just two wheels. It’s capable of very tight turns, accelerates in seconds to its top speed, and stops even quicker.
On the other hand, gita can’t navigate stairs. I had to recruit one of my children to help me lug it down to ground level before each trip, then heft it onto the porch on my return.
The smartphone app that lets you play music through gita’s speaker also allows you to lock the device so nobody else can stroll off with it while you’re shopping. It lacks an attachment point for a security cable, so you can’t fasten it to a bike rack.
But who’s going to swipe it? There’s no obvious demand for these robots, not yet anyway. Piaggio’s big challenge is to make them popular enough to be worth stealing. And at its current price, there’s not much chance of a sudden rush on them.
For now, gita is mostly a celebrity plaything. You’ll see pictures of them in the tabloids, tagging along with celebrities like Taryn Manning of “Orange is the New Black,” and Brooke Burke of “Dancing With The Stars.”
Then there are the gearheads. Luke Chilone, a software architect at the Bedfordresearch and development company MITRE, bought one of the first gita robots last year, and has more than 100 miles on it.
“I don’t need it,” acknowledged Chilone, who lives in Boston’s Seaport District, “though I take it everywhere” — the post office, the bakery, Trader Joe’s.
Piaggio is also recruiting commercial users, such as Debra Brodsky, marketing director for local real estate firm WS Development. Brodsky strolls the Seaport handing out fliers for events in the neighborhood stashed in a gita that rolls a respectful 3 feet behind her.
“We used to carry all of those supplies in a wagon,” said Brodsky. “And then we realized, this is a neighborhood steeped in tech and innovation. What are we doing? So we got ourselves a robot.”
Gita has also been deployed at the Cincinnati airport to tote carry-on baggage for passengers with disabilities, and a food delivery service in Lexington, Ky., is giving it a try. The delivery person will just walk to each destination, leading a gita filled with food. There’ll be no traffic problems, and no futile search for a place to park.
But only TV stars and corporations can afford a gita at today’s prices. And Lynn conceded that it will take years to get the price down below two grand. He said he’d welcome some competition.
But the truth is, gita’s already got plenty of competition: bicycles, cabs, Uber and Lyft, and yes, even those cheap folding pushcarts my mother used back in the day. None of these are nearly as cool as gita, but at least you’ll have money left over for groceries.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeTechLab.
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