Automation – Page 10

Automation, Automobiles, Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Waymo is taking the safety drivers out to its autonomous taxis

December 26, 2019

No Hands!

Waymo, the Google-affiliated self-driving car company, has finally started to operate its self-driving taxi service without any humans sitting behind the wheel.

That means passengers using the company’s Uber-like Waymo One service might find themselves shuttled around Arizona in the back seat of an otherwise-empty minivan, as one reporter for The Verge did. Removing the drivers is a major milestone in the race for fully-autonomous transport — the vehicles are still supervised remotely, but Waymo is now confident enough in its cars to almost entirely take humans out of the loop.

Continue reading… “Waymo is taking the safety drivers out to its autonomous taxis”

Automation, Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News

A self-driving truck delivered butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days

December 20, 2019

A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck, which finished a 2,800-mile-run from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania for Land O’Lakes in under three days. The trip was smooth like butter, 40,000 pounds of it.

Plus.ai, a 3-year-old company in Cupertino, announced the milestone, recently. A safety driver was aboard the autonomous semi, ready to take the wheel if needed, along with a safety engineer who observed how things were going.

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Automation, Electric Vehicles, Science & Technology News

Coca-Cola test-drives Einride’s autonomous truck in Sweden

December 19, 2019

An Einride vehicle will ferry goods between warehouses operated by Coca-Cola European Partners and Axfood, one of Sweden’s largest food retailers.

Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), the brand’s local bottling partner, will deploy the Einride autonomous electric transport system to its Swedish distribution network, according to a news release.

As part of a commercial pilot, an Einride vehicle will ferry goods between warehouses operated by CCEP and Axfood, one of Sweden’s leading food retailers, an Einride spokesperson told FreightWaves.

The warehouses are located in Jordbro outside Stockholm, some in fenced areas and others situated along public roads.

The partnership with CCEP will run over the next few years and explore opportunities to improve sustainability and efficiency in warehouse transport, the release said.

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Automation, Employment, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

We would rather lose our jobs to robots than humans, a study shows

December 5, 2019

Losing your job to a human stings more than getting replaced by a robot, research found.

The question has a surprising psychological factor for workers now and in the future.

Losing a job can be stressful and demoralizing. Seeing your role replaced by automation is an additional stressor that more workers will have to contend with and worry about in the future.

Robots are already replacing people in some jobs. Apps take orders in chain restaurants, and some supermarkets use self-checkout machines to replace checkers. This is the new reality. The Brookings Institution predicts that 36 million Americans face a “high exposure to automation” in the coming decades, meaning they will have more than 70% of their role at risk of being substituted by artificial intelligence.

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Automation, Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News, Shopping

NYC threatens to seize any Fedex delivery bots on city streets

December 5, 2019

In February, FedEx debuted its SameDay Bots, which are parcel delivery robots that use a combination of artificial intelligence and motion sensors to navigate city streets and sidewalks.

Last week, social media users began reporting sightings of the bots in New York City. But based on a tweet from Mayor Bill de Blasio, FedEx never bothered to get permission to test the robots in the Big Apple — and it could be the bots’ undoing.

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Automation, Employment, Robots, Science & Technology News

Workers in these 10 US areas are more likely to be replaced by robots

December 4, 2019

A new report maps the top 10 areas of the US with the highest robot intensity

In the last decade, the number of manufacturing robots has more than doubled in the US to almost 2 per 1,000 workers

Some studies predict as many as 50% of all workers are at risk of losing their jobs to automation

Robots are displacing younger, less-educated, and minority workers in the Midwest manufacturing industry at the highest rates, a new report shows.

However, the findings also show that a strong economic recovery over the past decade has saved many jobs and slowed automation in the United States.

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Automation, Robots, Science & Technology News, Shopping

The robots of Black Friday

November 30, 2019

Delivery robot from Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn. Photo: Niels Wenstedt/AFP via Getty Images

Look out for the first of the retail robots as you shop this year.

Why it matters: From machines that can restock shelves to robot deliverers, automation is creeping into the retail industry. The first-ever cargo-carrying robot for consumers comes from Italian company Piaggio. The robot is similar to the delivery bots that FedEx and Amazon have been testing, but it can be yours for a few thousand bucks, AP reports.

Between the lines: On top of the more than 15 million Americans who work in retail year-round, companies routinely hire hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to staff stores and warehouses during big shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The development of more — and smarter — retail robots puts those jobs at risk.

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Automation, Computer Security, Driverless cars, Science & Technology News

Here’s how quantum computer supremacy will impact self-driving cars

November 23, 2019

Quantum supremacy, achieved?

The news recently was agog with the claim that the so-called and highly sought “quantum supremacy” had been achieved via an effort undertaken by Google researchers.

Not everyone agreed though that the Google effort warranted waving the superlative supremacy flag.

That’s not to say that the use of their 54-qubit Sycamore processor wasn’t notable, and in fact, does provide another handy stride toward achieving viable quantum computing, but whether it was the vaunted moment of true supreme magnificence is something that many would argue is premature and supremely debatable.

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Automation, China, drones, Science & Technology News, Weapons

China is selling autonomous killer drones to the Middle East

November 16, 2019

Chinese military contractors have already started to sell dangerous, autonomous killer robots to customers in the Middle East.

For instance, a Chinese company called Ziyan is actively marketing its Blowfish A3 — an autonomous helicopter-like drone armed with a machine gun — to international buyers, according to Defense One. While several countries have been working towards this tech for years, this news means we’re finally, and unfortunately, living in the era of killer robots.

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Automation, Healthcare, Medicine, Robotics, Science & Technology News

The pharmacy of the future will see robots come to the rescue of humans

November 14, 2019

High technology is changing the way pharmacies operate – and how customers get served

It looks like a normal pharmacy in a normal Johannesburg shopping mall. But behind the scenes at the Morningside Dispensary, a revolution is underway

It may not be getting the attention that politicians get when they talk of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it is a real and practical example of what emerging technologies make possible in everyday life.

For the customers of this pharmacy are being served by a robot. Even when they don’t realise it, and are talking to a human pharmacist, the efficiency with which they are being served is made possible by a robot.

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2020 Predictions, Automation, Employment, Science & Technology News

2020 predictions about automation and the future of work from Forrester

November 11, 2019

Over 1 million knowledge-work jobs will be replaced in 2020 by software robotics, RPA, virtual agents and chatbots, and machine-learning-based decision management. So predicts research firm Forrester in a new report published today, “Predictions 2020: Automation.” It also estimates that 331,500 net jobs will be added to the US workforce next year, human-touch jobs that require intuition, empathy, and physical and mental agility.

Forrester highlights what it calls “the automation paradox,” predicting that after years of falling, MTTR or Mean-Time-To-Resolution (the time it takes to resolve an IT failure, for example) will increase. This is the result of automating the “low-hanging fruit,” the repetitive tasks and incidents, leaving the more complex and time-consuming problems for humans to fix.

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Automation, Automobiles, Driverless cars, Science & Technology News, Transportation

The problem with all self-driving cars looking alike

November 7, 2019

Self-driving cars within fleets will look alike, creating problems.

Have you ever seen a sea of yellow cabs, all of which seem indistinguishable from each other?

It used to be that if you booked a yellow cab for picking you up at a busy airport or similar venue, the odds were that a slew of other yellow cabs were also vying for picking up passengers there too. As such, you would have a tough time trying to figure out which among the multitudes of yellow cabs was the one designated just for you.

The cabs sometimes had a number displayed on the outside of the vehicle, and in theory, you could then spot your particular yellow cab, but possessing the number was one tricky aspect and the other was the arduous difficulty of trying to clearly see the number among the blur of so many cabs.

There was pretty much little point in reserving a cab beforehand and instead, it seemed wiser to take a chance at randomly hailing a cab.

Today’s world is a sea change, as it were.

Continue reading… “The problem with all self-driving cars looking alike”