---
title: "Meet Gita, Vespa’s Luggage-Carrying Personal Robot"
description: "The company behind Vespa scooters has created a rolling \"cargo robot\" to haul your stuff."
date: "2017-02-06"
modified: "2017-02-06"
authors:
  - name: "Josh Condon"
    job_title: "Deputy Editor"
    link: "https://www.thedrive.com/authors/josh-condon"
url: "https://www.thedrive.com/tech/7393/meet-gita-vespas-luggage-carrying-personal-robot"
categories:
  - "Culture"
  - "News"
tags:
  - "consumer tech"
  - "Robot"
  - "Scooter"
  - "Vespa"
---

# Meet Gita, Vespa’s Luggage-Carrying Personal Robot

![](<https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/images-by-url-td/content/2017/02/gita_following_3-e1486397364535.jpg>)
*\<em\>www.thedrive.com</em>*

## An Autonomous Vehicle for Your Stuff

If you think the robotic revolution begins and ends with things like [self-driving cars](<https://www.thedrive.com/news/4872/ford-says-it-will-have-fully-self-driving-cars-by-2021>) and [autonomous helicopter taxis](<https://www.thedrive.com/tech/7313/jetpack-pioneers-unveil-another-flying-car-concept-into-growing-arena>), you're not thinking small enough. But Piaggio, the Italian company behind [Vespa scooters](<https://www.vespa.com/us_EN>) and [Motto Guzzi motorcycles](<https://www.motoguzzi-us.com/>), certainly is with its new personal valet robot, Gita.

Dubbed a "cargo robot," the cylindrical carbon-fiber bot is just 26 inches high, has zero turning radius, and can carry 40 pounds of gear up to 22 mph—to keep up with a jogger or biker—and under ideal conditions can function for up to eight hours. Thanks to the various cameras embedded in its shell, Gita can follow a person, or perform a solo navigation of an area it has previously mapped. The machine was created by Piaggio's in-house ideas incubator, Piaggio Fast Forward, based in Boston.

![Gita 2](<https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/message-editor/1486397920196-cargo_bin_fulledited.jpg>)
*Gita 2*

*, The Gita cargo robot, full of stuff., *Ingo Meckmann**

Speaking to Tech Crunch, Piaggio Fast Forward chief creative officer Greg Lynn discussed the types of needs that prompted the new cargo robot:

> “We come from a world of lightweight, two and three-wheeled cycles, scooters and mini trucks. Everything we do is lightweight and made for highly congested cities, like Bangkok or Hanoi, where traffic is a real problem. We wanted to extend people’s movement and encourage them to move more freely and easily, even in congested environments.”

> — Piaggio Fast Forward chief creative officer Greg Lynn

## Creating an Indoor Mapping Database

While being shadowed by a big blue rolling purse may seem odd, there's a secondary benefit, according to Piaggio Fast Forward's chief operating officer Sasha Hoffman, [who told TC](<https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/why-piaggio-built-gita-a-cargo-carrying-robot-to-follow-in-your-footsteps/>) that, because Gita maps its environment while following a human, operating the bot indoors will allow the company to create a database of navigable location data which is essentially invisible to services like Waze or Google maps—places like airports, campuses, and resorts. That's good for, say, tourists, but also a boon to the people who work at such facilities and may soon be able to summon tools or supplies remotely.

![Gita 3](<https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/message-editor/1486397843969-gita_followingedited.jpg>)
*Gita 3*

*, The Gita cargo robot can autonomously follow a human—up to 22 mph., *Ingo Meckmann**

## Author
Josh is a former editor at *Details*, *Road & Track*, and *MSN Autos*, and has contributed about a variety of topics to publications including *The New York Times*, *Men’s Journal*, *Automobile* and *Men’s Fitness*.

### Author social links