Making Life Easier With Robotic Vehicles
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
One of the obstacles for widespread use of robotic vehicles is crafting an effective enough grid to prevent collisions and safely transport citizens to all their diverse destinations. It’s believed that sky transport will be one of the first revolutionary breakthroughs, since passenger robotic vehicles much like “sky buses” have already been created and tested. It’s not reasonable to assume every person can have their own personal car taking off from a special port in their driveways, but people can drive to their nearest community port and take off, scientists say. The onus lies on creating a highway for the sky, then, to ensure that airplanes, helicopters, satellites and robotics technology can all coexist peacefully. This may be in the far off future, but there are many unmanned vehicles already in use today.
We’ve heard this claim before. In the next forty years, we will have robotic vehicles drive us! Dewar Donnithorne-Tait from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International says that by 2050, it will be safer, cheaper and easier to use automated vehicles and that most people will be doing so. The military is already developing a semi-autonomous ground vehicle called the MDARS machine, which chooses its own routes, drives itself, detects intruders, runs diagnostics, avoids obstacles and communicates with the locks to ensure they haven’t been tampered with. The autonomous robots can drive with others on the road, runs for 16 hours on a tank of petrol and will be one of twelve machines monitored by a soldier at a time.
Civilian robotic vehicles are also being developed for a number of uses. Sonar robotics technology is capturing never-before-seen images of deep sea beds with the Synthetic Aperture Sonar. Farmers use these vehicles to check on their crops. Forest rangers count trees and monitor wildlife in remote regions of their parks. Surface water vehicles are skimming the coasts, while underwater devices are recovering old shipwrecks and AWOL lobster traps that have fallen loose, thus threatening endangered marine animals.
You may not know it, but automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are transporting materials all around warehouses and hospitals at this very moment. The early robotic vehicles were easy to make, researchers say, but they were fairly limited in their paths and found it difficult to adapt to changes in their environments. The interim robotics automation could scan bar code grid lines on the floor or use laser technology to maneuver around, although tall obstacles still blocked the way and routine maintenance was high. New robotic vehicles are trained to circumnavigate around any obstacle, whether it is a pallet or a person. They use 3-D scanners, maps and other complex systems. In the future, people are expected to work alongside robots much more frequently.