We live in an incredible era of human history, one where work and labor are constantly being moved from the burden of people to the work of machines. With the industrial revolution, the way we live has become easier, safer, and more affordable. Construction occurs further from infrastructure with the advent of self-powered tools. Food production has become safer and more consistent with automated production. Computers and the internet have allowed information to be shared at a global level and an instantaneous rate. Despite these advancements, however, there has been one crucial field that for a long time has eluded the efforts of automation: vehicles.
The Future is Now….Sort of
For a long time, the idea of autonomous vehicles seemed out of reach. Unlike cell phones and home electronics, when a vehicle fails, it often does so in a dangerous way. And yet, full autonomy in vehicles has been inching closer in the past few years.
In many ways, these advancements have crept into daily life without much notice. Slowly but surely, small steps have been taken to build up the foundation needed for a vehicle to be fully autonomous. Headlights and windshield wipers can automatically engage. Accelerator pedals make use of an electronic system to smooth the driver’s input to increase reliability and safety. Radar-based cruise control can control a vehicle’s speed and bring it to a stop if an obstacle appears ahead. Most vehicles use these pieces to exhibit lower levels of automation. Many modern cars can pilot themselves in controlled environments, such as highway driving.
These changes haven’t been reserved for passenger vehicles. Similar steps have been taken in the agricultural industry as well. Crops used to have to be checked for moisture, health, and maturity by hand. With advanced sensor arrays, these parameters can be measured at the exact moment of harvest, creating a more accurate and granular report of a field’s productivity.
Cranes on construction sites used to rely on the operator’s expertise to know how far was too far to carry a load. Nowadays automatic envelope monitoring allows the safe lifting and transportation of materials higher and farther than before.
Making Bricks from Clay
The advancement in autonomous vehicles has been a massive undertaking, backed by the improvements of dozens of different subsystems. More powerful and robust visual systems such as LiDAR and Radar create a closed loop of control, allowing a vehicle to know its surroundings. With the improvement of batteries and hybrid electric power systems, more and more electrical systems can be installed on a vehicle knowing that their power-hungry processing cycles can be fed by an efficient power network.
CAN buses and other communication protocols allow the eyes and ears of a machine to be monitored and acted upon by a network of central control units. Autonomous vehicles need to be able to not only act but react. They must adjust and improve by taking an action, monitoring the result, and taking note on how it can be improved for next time.
Modern wireless connections take this a step further, allowing vehicles to exist as a collective rather than an individual. Any autonomous vehicle that notices an issue on the road such as a fallen branch or a particularly nasty pothole can instantly report the issue to all other vehicles on the network, allowing every subsequent vehicle to respond to the issue with familiarity.
Making sense of all of this data is the modern Artificial Intelligence. With powerful modern computing, Machine Learning models have begun to border on levels of efficacy previously only seen in science fiction novels. With all of these subsystems working in concert, a computerized system can have everything it needs to monitor and control a vehicle.
The Cities of the Future
As the technology behind autonomous vehicles matures, countless new applications begin to appear. The most obvious is personal transport. On average, Americans spend over an hour behind the wheel every day. Fully autonomous vehicles will give them this time back. At the highest levels of automation this time can be used to relax, read, eat, or sleep.
In the commercial sector, construction equipment will begin to run itself. Quarry trucks will run loads of material without supervision or incident. Cranes will work around the clock to shift loads to upper floors of buildings in construction.
For agriculture, where improvements are disseminated to the rest of society, the shift will be even more impactful. With an autonomous fleet that runs at all hours of the day, crops will be more closely monitored at planting, tended to at more precise times, and harvested at exactly the right moment.
The way goods are transported will be overhauled. No longer will heavy trucks be limited to the driving hours of their drivers. They will run their freight to their destination with the only pauses being to refuel. In more congested locations, freight transport could even be restricted to less busy hours without worrying about how a driver would make themselves available.
Paradigm Shifts of Autonomous Transport
Once autonomous vehicles reach a tipping point, they can begin to take advantage of new paradigms previously made impossible by the presence of human drivers. A completely autonomous traffic network wouldn’t need stoplights at all. Vehicles in perfect communication with each other could adjust their speeds and avoid each other while crossing through an intersection at the same time.
Law enforcement wouldn’t need to patrol for traffic infractions, instead the autonomous vehicles would be programmed to follow the laws of the road without any need of a threat of a ticket. Fewer people would feel the need to use the relatively environmentally worse option of flying if they could simply depart to their destination at night, sleep in their car, and wake up at their destination.
The invention, refinement, and proliferation of autonomous vehicles may become one of the greatest shifts of modern times. The safety afforded by a fully autonomous vehicle will reduce accidents on roads, construction sites, farms, factories, and anywhere else vehicles are used. The refinement of logistics and construction will allow more goods to be produced with greater efficiency and at a lower cost. Agriculture will occur at a higher density and with less environmental impact. The burden and danger of operating a vehicle will become a thing of the past. Despite all the incredible innovations of the 21st century, the greatest is yet to come.
If you are looking to propel your technology into the future, reach out today to see how DISTek can help provide automation.
