Autonomous-Driving

Autonomous Drones Perform Inventory in Warehouse A subsidiary of Hyuandai Motors now uses drones to perform inventory in their warehouses. It reduces the time for an inventory by 90% to 30 Minutes. The drones fly autonomously and orient themselves with their cameras - no GPS required. Seems like a perfect way to free humans from boring and repetitive work. Military Transport Drone Carries Freight Almost 1,000km Company MightyFly of California presents an autonomous transport drone. It can fly freight of 220kg for almost 1,000km and take off and land vertically. It is intended for military applications, but can also have civilian use, for instance in disaster relieve. Watch this video to get a first impression. Should this mode of transport prove reliable and efficient, I see the potential to profoundly change freight transport. Imagine a company urgently needs some extra parts from their supplier – they can have them within the hour if they have such a drone. Amazing! Autonomous Submarine for Drug Trafficking When I think of submarines, I think of boats full of soldiers, hunting the enemy or carrying rockets. Transport of people or goods do not come to my mind - even though hypersonic submarines might be used this way in the future. Yet it appears my imagination has not been vivid enough. Submarines, or at least “semisubmersibles”, are alreaddy in active use for freight transport. The use is neither military nor civilian. It is for drug transport. From this article I learned there are actual shipyards in the Columbian jungle. The semisubmersibles carry cocaine and other drugs from Columbia to other countries in America, and now across the globe. Nowadays, these boats can even be unmanned, using Starlink for communication and navigation. Ingenious – and worrying. How can we protect ourselves from such boats, be it for them carrying drugs or even other malign payloads such as explosives? Title Image is a screenshot from the video that MightyFly released on Youtube.

This week’s issue of The Economist raised an interesting question in a book review: Why do we focus on technological innovation to solve problems we could already solve with technology we already have? The question raised in the Economist was: Autonomous vehicles are supposed to make roads safer. But if our goal is to make roads safer, why not focus more on public transportation instead of new technology for cars?

An American startup is on a mission to change rail freight forever. They want to introduce self-driving, autonomous freight cars. The idea is to make rail freight more flexible and cost-effective, and to get more freight on the rails. Let’s take a look at what the future of freight could look like.

This week I want to share with you some news articles from this week that I found particularly noteworthy.

Imagine a city where all cars drive autonomously. In such a city, traffic could flow much more efficiently because a central intelligence could control the cars and interleave them at intersections. Also, you would never have to look for a parking space: Your car could drop you off at your destination and then find a parking space on its own. We are still a long way from fleets of self-driving cars, but the Carfax concept aims to change that by equipping all cars with a self-driving platform.

Automated Valet Parking - this is a buzzword that appears frequently in the media these days. Press releases from companies promise that we will soon be freed from the task of finding a parking space in a garage. In the future, we will simply leave our cars at the entrance and they will be parked automatically. There are many different technologies competing for this future market. Where do we stand in this evolution? In this article, I will try to give an overview of the current state of the technology.

On a recent visit to Nuremberg, Germany, I had the opportunity to ride a driverless train on the Nuremberg subway.{{ double-space-with-newline }}It is the only fully automated subway in Germany. And although the first automated subway line opened in 2008, not all lines are automated today. I asked myself: Why is it that fully automated subways are not more widespread, even though the technology has been around for more than 15 years?

The latest hype in the car industry is the autonomous car. It seems like the dream of a vehicle that can drive on its own is within our grasp and that is is only a matter of a few years until we can buy one. This will free us of driving ourselves and will enable driverless taxis, make private cars superfluous and replace all local transport. At least this is what we can read these days in the newspapers. But is it true? This article tries to examine what impact the introduction of self-driving vehicles might have on our streets, our cities and our lives.