Automate More, To Increase Productivity. Makes Sense, But Why Don't Organizations Do That More Often?

 By now, most organizations should understand that automating processes does more than just make work go faster. Besides decreasing the overall cost to undertake tasks, workflow automation can help the staff avoid wasting their energy on repetitive tasks -- such as sending emails and following up on leads or generating documents. This frees them up to execute more productive and important tasks. 

Aiming to implement automation enables staff to avoid insignificant, repetitive tasks. They can shift their focus to value-oriented functions such as innovation in the development of new ideas and processes. Organizations that automate business processes change their workflows by reducing mundane activities and increasing team productivity. By automating business processes, companies can improve their processes, shorten business process cycle times, and maximize efficiency. The automation of processes completes tasks that were previously manual.

A good strategy for automating business processes can help maintain control over processes, reduce  errors, improve communication, and improve quality. Let's face it: repetitive and boring tasks can be frustrating, which leads to lower employee satisfaction. The use of automated processes in knowledge work processes can help a company produce higher quality deliverables and increase profits. For this reason, using technology to automate processes can help increase efficiency, productivity, and stabilize levels of quality control.

With tools that enable decision makers to monitor every step of the process without checking in with every employee, process automation enables staff to hone their precise role. The processes and tasks for which staff are responsible become streamlined, demonstrating one of the major benefits of workflow automation: it takes a lot of the pressure off staff. Think of when there are a lot of operational tasks that need to be done.

For example, when a team member needs to work through a list of ten items, chances are there are one or two tasks that one might dreading doing. When these tasks are automated, it provides relief for everyone and lightens the workload. Another great workflow automation benefit is that companies can hire more remote workers and keep their expenses down.

Autonomous Cars... Unfortunately Not Gonna Solve Real World Problems

Once, people thought fast highways would improve efficiency and erase traffic congestion and accidents. After these highways were actually built, however, induced demand quickly clogged them up, as people took advantage of the new roads to make new trips that they didn’t make before. Futurama -- not the show, the exhibition -- made this point.

If -- a big "if" -- autonomous vehicles do eventually arrive, they risk introducing a more dangerous version of the same phenomenon. Not only will efficient autonomous motorways tempt people to drive further, but the ability to work -- or even sleep -- while travelling will make people think much less of a long commute.

Cars might also become less energy-efficient as they’re modified to meet the demands of users. Electric vehicles carry heavy (and in the case of Lithium Ion batteries, more dangerous) their power supply with them. Passengers may run them at higher speeds because the cars themselves may be safer, but this consumes more energy due to aerodynamic resistance. Car manufacturers may also begin to design larger vehicles to accommodate mobile offices. 

In the autonomous vehicle utopia, we are told self-driving cars will be shared, rather than owned privately. Admittedly this would be a more sustainable option, but, unfortunately, people get attached to their cars. They like having a vehicle that is instantly available, that they can use as a mobile storage locker, and that signals their social status. While Uber, Lyft and other services show people appreciate the convenience of summoning a lift from an app, it is doubtful such services will replace private vehicle ownership.

One model being explored in Europe sees the autonomous vehicle collect you up on your way to an appointment, more in the style of a last-mile shuttle for public transit. It would move slowly but comfortably, picking up multiple passengers on its way to the local transit hub, where you would board a fast and efficient light rail line. You would still arrive at your destination with time to spare.

Of course, in all likelihood, autonomous vehicles will only become a niche product. Watch the video...

Self-Drive Delivery Van from VW in Germany, Coming Soon!

 We read at the Verge,

Volkswagen will start testing its new autonomous vehicles in Germany this summer, the company announced Wednesday. The German automaker’s electric ID Buzz vans will use hardware and software developed by Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based startup that is backed by Ford and VW. The aim is to launch a commercial delivery and micro-transit service in Germany by 2025.

Argo, which has been testing its vehicles in the US with Ford for the last few years, said it would be launching the fifth generation of its automated driving technology with the VW ID Buzz, which is the electric version of the automaker’s iconic microbus. Bryan Salesky, the startup’s founder and CEO, praised the collaborative nature of Argo and Volkswagen’s partnership.

Read more...

 

Goes Both Ways - Fast! Robotaxi purpose-built from the tarmac up...

 The Zoox Robotaxi Is a Bi-Directional autonomous vehicle, built specifically to be a robot car.  

We learn over at Yanko that the Amazon-owned Zoox...

... is a conventional cube-shaped with a unique bi-directional ride sans any steering wheel – having the capability to smoothly navigate tight spaces without much fuzz since it comes with a 4 wheel independent suspension system. The fact that it can move in any direction (independent turning wheels) and does not need to reverse (remember it is bi-directional) gives it an advantage on urban roads as it measures just 3.63 meters. 

The interior of the autonomous ride has charging ports and a small display is quite minimalistic with emphasis on passenger safety as there are next-generation airbags enveloping the passengers, providing five-star safety standards by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. 

To further enhance the safety of the riders, the vehicle is decked in six LIDAR pucks, multiple sensors, and cameras for a 270-degree field of view – covering the blind spots and having the ability to see objects 150 meters away en route for a safe ride. And it can achieve a top speed of 70 miles per hour, so you can rest assured of arriving at your destination on time.

Need to Get Around in Barcelona? Take a Robot Helo-Taxi

Enaire, Spain’s air navigation authority, has announced plans to begin demonstrating flying taxis in Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela in 2022.

“We need to move urban mobility into the third dimension: airspace. And we need to do it as efficiently and sustainably as we can,” the authority’s director general, Ángel Luis Arias, told an online conference this week.

 Ehang, a Chinese drone company, announced a new product at CES it's calling the Ehang 184, an all electric quadcopter scaled up from a drone so that it's large enough to carry a passenger. Ehang calls it an autonomous aerial vehicle, I prefer personal pilotless helicopter, but if you need to explain what it is to anyone, just say it's a driverless car for the sky.

Ehang says the 184, which is all electric, can carry a single passenger up to 10 miles or roughly 23 minutes of flight. The person in the cockpit doesn’t do any piloting, they just input their destination and enjoy the ride. The aircraft claims to be able to autonomously take off, fly a route, sense obstacles, and land. And if anything goes wrong, a human pilot is supposed to step in and take over the controls from a remote command station.Read 

more over at the Guardian...

Has the Robot Future Pulled Up to the Curb?

In a milestone for the self-driving industry, Waymo said it will open up its autonomous ride-hailing service to the general public in metro Phoenix, Arizona. In the upcoming weeks, people in the Phoenix area can hail a taxi like they would a Lyft or an Uber ... then hop in a car that’ll know where they want to go to be taken to that destination. But... the car will be driving itself!

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle division, has been testing its cars in the Phoenix area since 2016, diligently upgrading the technology and capacity to eventually roll out a fully fledged commercial service.  Hundreds of testers have been experimenting with the Robot Taxi service through the Waymo One app. 

The announcement expands the current program in two ways:

• Existing customers of Waymo One can start taking their friends and family along.
• By November, Waymo will make the app available to the “general public” in the Phoenix area.

To deal with the current pandemic, Waymo is limiting the scope of its service by restricting it to fully driverless rides. It is installing barriers in its vehicles so down the road it can plunk a human safety driver in the front seat and address a larger geographical market. 

Other car companies -- namely Tesla and GM -- are racing to introduce driverless vehicles, but Waymo has recently pulled away from the pack. This spring, it raised $3 billion to accelerate the rollout of its commercial service, using money for the first time from a company not associated with Google.

Read more here...

Robo-Taxis on the Streets of China... by the millions?

Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing says it plans to operate more than a million self-driving vehicles by 2030. The robo-taxis are to be deployed in places where ride-hailing drivers are less available, according to Meng Xing, Didi’s chief operating officer, speaking at an online conference hosted by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper.

In 2016, US tech giant Apple invested $1bn in Didi in an unusually large and public investment. Apple is known to be interested in autonomous driving, having tested its own driverless vehicle on public roads in California in recent years.

The local government in Shanghai awarded Didi a permit to test its autonomous vehicles on public roads in Jiading District of Shanghai. The company says it plans to expand beyond that district starting in 2021, deploying “30 different models of L4 autonomous vehicles.” (L4 means Level 4 on the Society of Automotive Engineers scale of autonomy, which means the vehicle is able to operate without any human intervention within a defined geographic area.)

It wasn't that long ago that the company experimented with autonomous vehicles... read more here...

People Would Be More Accepting of Jonny-Cab Once They Try Them Out

Autonomous vehicles seem to have s public perception problem, according to new survey data collected by an industry group. Partners for Automated Vehicle Education surveyed 1,200 Americans earlier this year and found that 48 percent of Americans say they would "never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle that was being driven autonomously." And slightly more Americans -- 20 percent versus 18 percent -- think autonomous vehicles will never be safe compared to those who say they'd put their names down on a waiting list to get a ride in an autonomous vehicle.

According to the survey data, getting a ride in a robotaxi might change some of those minds. Three in five said that they'd have more trust in autonomous vehicles if they had a better understanding of how those vehicles worked, and 58 percent said that firsthand experience -- i.e. going for a ride in a self-driving car -- would make them trust the technology more.
"Of the 1,200 survey respondents, 678 reported owning an [advanced driver assistance system] ADAS-equipped vehicle, and three-quarters of them said they 'will feel safer on the road when I know that most other vehicles have enhanced safety features,' with the same number saying they are eager to see what new safety features will be on their next vehicle," the report adds.

As describer at Slashdot, "Interestingly, drivers who own cars with forward collision warning (FCW), blind spot monitoring (BSM), lane departure warning (LDW), and automatic emergency braking (AEB) were also more likely to believe that safe autonomous vehicles would be available within the next 10 years compared to those without those features."

Alphabet (Google) Wing Drone Delivery Service Debuts in Virginia

Alphabet's Wing drone delivery service made its first commercial delivery in Christiansburg, Virginia on October 18, 2019. Wing is a spinoff from Google's parent company, Alphabet. The drone (UAV) service delivered a package through the air from a distribution center to a home in Christiansburg, Virginia, on behalf of FedEx.

Wing received Federal Aviation Authority approval for door-to-door drone delivery. Wing’s partners for this service include FedEx Express, Walgreens, and Sugar Magnolia (a local Virginia retail operation). This constitutes the first businesses in the United States to offer this form of local air delivery to customers.

FedEx is also participating in the U.S. Department of Transportation's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program in conjunction with the Memphis Shelby-County Airport Authority, conducting drone operations on airport property to generate data to help inform future UAS policymaking.

During the trial, Wing drones will transport select FedEx packages to qualifying homes in Christiansburg, demonstrating last-mile delivery service.

Read more here and here

Waymo Placing Fully Autonomous Vehicles on the Road

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business under Alphabet (neé Google), sent an email to customers of its ride-hailing app in Phoenix, Arizona (USA) that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel. Fully autonomous / robot cars are here!

Waymo opened a testing and operations center in Chandler, Ariz. in 2016. Since then, the company has ramped up its testing in Chandler and other Phoenix suburbs, launched an early rider program and slowly crept toward commercial deployment. The early rider program, which required vetted applicants to sign non-disclosure agreements to participate, launched in April 2017.

Read more about the service here...

Is LIDAR going away for A.I. vision? Elon Musk says yes, others disagree

Cornell researchers published a research paper that is somewhat critical of about lidar. Using nothing but stereo cameras, the computer scientists achieved breakthrough results on KITTI, a popular image recognition benchmark for self-driving systems. Their new technique produced results far superior to previously published camera-only results—and not far behind results that combined camera and lidar data. LiDAR sensors use lasers to create 3D point maps of their surroundings, measuring objects’ distance via the speed of light. Stereo cameras, which rely on two perspectives to establish depth, as human eyes do, seemed promising. But their accuracy in object detection has been woefully low, and the conventional wisdom was that they were too imprecise.

Radar sensors deliver images similar to optical sensors. LiDAR delivers points which measure the distance between the instrument and the target. Cameras plus lidar performed better than cameras alone had nothing to do with the superior accuracy of lidar's distance measurements. Rather, it was because the "native" data format from lidar is easier for machine-learning algorithms to work with.

More Robot Cars, More Fun in the City

Drivers are already ditching their cars because of apps like Uber. Imagine what happens when driverless cars hit the roads.

Why bother owning a car when you can easily get where you want via your iPhone? This concept is known as “mobility as a service”, where passengers no longer own to their own cars, instead signing on for transportation-on-demand booked through smartphones.

Perhaps, for instance, a commuting plan that charges by the mile or through a monthly fee, like Netflix. Getting rid of cars in growing urban centers is a smart idea, and the world’s automakers are preparing in various ways. A major switch to subscription transportation requires two components. The first is already well underway: the explosion of ride-hailing apps like Uber, Lyft, Grab and others.
The second is still in the works — driverless cars.

Removing the human from behind the wheel slashes the cost of a taxi ride which will make mobility as a service so cheap in many places, it won’t make financial sense to own a car any longer. Lowering the cost per mile will turbo-charge demand for mobility as a service, likely to become a $10 trillion business, according to Ford Motor Company.

That's why tech giants like Google and Apple are developing their own self-driving systems to take on the world's leading automakers, including Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford, and Toyota.

Eventually, a single smartphone app could connect us to a web of options, such as robo-taxis, self-driving shuttles, on-demand subway or tram, e-bikes, and electric scooters. No more driving ourselves though congested cities. All that parking freed up means more space for pedestrians and parks. Unless it is bad — fleets of individually-owned driverless vehicles loosed upon streets and highways, randomly ferrying individual occupants near and far. Or, with so many shared rides, significantly fewer vehicles will be on the road, where is the need to spend billions on bigger highways?

Autonomous vehicles will revolutionize passenger transport, but they are also rapidly changing the delivery business. Data generated from self-driving cars will provide cities with “a more granular viewpoint into everything from infrastructure wear-and-tear to detailed traffic flow information and even sidewalk congestion patterns,” says Brooks Rainwater, director of the Center for City Solutions at the National League of Cities.

Read more here…  http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/self-driving-cars-cities/

Will Robo-Cars be Unaffordable?

Many are eagerly awaiting self-driving cars -- but we should recall that all of Silicon Valley’s big bets don’t always pay off.

Silicon Valley is pouring billions into robot cars. Soon – although the time scale keeps shifting – tech manufacturers say driverless cars will replace their traditional counterparts, car parks will become parks again and road fatalities will plummet. People have argued over ethical concerns surrounding the technology, the ensuing job losses and the public’s antipathy to this robot revolution. But the biggest obstacle may well be money.

The article continues, "Driver wages are a key part of taxi fares today. The average cab ride in San Francisco, for example, will cost you around $13. The driver keeps most of that. There is one caveat, however. Taxis are inefficient – so inefficient in fact that cabbies only spend about half their time earning fares."

Read more here....

Passengers are using Self-Driving Cars in California

Self-driving car startup Zoox won permission Friday to start offering rides to passengers in California. Zoox will submit information to the commission on the number of passenger miles traveled in the test cars and any incidents that occur, along with pollution and safety data.

It's a milestone in the race to make autonomous vehicles safe and comfortable enough to be trusted by lawmakers and the public at large.

Read more...

Helo Drone Taxi Test in Dubai

A driverless flying drone has begun testing in Dubai, with hopes that the volocopter taxi two passengers on journeys of up to 30 minutes by air around the city.

Read more...

Just Get on the Streets already

Many experts agree —self-driving technology is already capable of making our roads significantly safer. A study from the RAND Corporation suggests self-driving technology be rolled out despite its imperfections.

Read here...

Ban the Car... from Cities

With so many deaths that could be avoided, many wonder why we should allow cars into cities...

"More than 40,000 Americans were killed by cars in 2016 — the equivalent of a fully-loaded Boeing 747 falling out of the sky once every three days. It's more than the 33,000 annual gun deaths, and more than the 20,000-plus people killed by synthetic opioids that year. Half of those automobile fatalities occurred in urban areas; about 6,000 of them were pedestrians."

Read why cars should be banned from cities...

Apple Self-Drive Tech is Self-Contained, for Easy Deployment

Apple has a different approach -- creating a "thing" that can be grafted onto any vehicle to make it self-driving. Apple has been working on its own version of autonomous driving, codenamed Project Titan.

...the majority of the compute stack is likely contained within the roof unit itself, rather than stored elsewhere in the vehicle, and noted that it had six LiDAR units on the front and back. Such a self-contained unit would be pretty easy to pop onto any car really without requiring many additional modifications to the vehicle itself, which is probably why Apple has opted for such a design...

Read more...

Coming Soon to a Road Near You (if you live in California)

Next year, autonomous cars without human drivers will be allowed on California roads.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles will allow autonomous cars without steering wheels, foot pedals, mirrors, and human drivers behind the wheel to be tested on its roads starting next year. The department released its revised regulations today governing the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles on public roads.

Read more at the Verge

Some Legislative Movement on Autonomous Vehicles

Congress might be making progress on self-driving cars: a bill put forth addresses manufacturers seeking to test robot cars have to demonstrate self-driving cars are at least as safe as existing vehicles. States could still set rules on registration, licensing, liability, insurance, and safety, but not performance standards.

The U.S. House ... unanimously approved a sweeping proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars without human controls by putting federal regulators in the driver’s seat and barring states from blocking autonomous vehicles.

The House measure, the first significant federal legislation aimed at speeding self-driving cars to market, would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year. The cap would rise over three years to 100,000 vehicles annually.

Read more...