Autonomous Vehicle Nesting

So what is Autonomous Vehicle Nesting? And why do we want it?

Have you ever seen a person in a wheelchair get on a train? Even while the train is moving, the person in the wheelchair can move within the train, even going from one car to another. That’s Vehicle Nesting.

We have already discussed Autonomous Vehicles coming a wide range of sizes and applications, from individual pills to hundreds of Shipping Containers. To go longer distances, smaller, short-range and slower Autonomous Vehicles will need to ride aboard faster, longer-range Autonomous Vehicles.

Given this range of capacities, speeds, and ranges, we should expect that some Autonomous Vehicles would travel inside other Autonomous Vehicles, often with several layers of nesting.

For example, we may have a small Autonomous Vehicle, just the right size to deliver your morning pills – it’s very effective in moving a few hundred feet to get to your breakfast table, but not for covering the 10 miles from your local pharmacy. Likewise, an Autonomous UPS truck is effective to pick up hundreds of orders at the pharmacy, but if it had to stop at every house to deliver that person’s pills, it would never make it in time for you to take your pills with breakfast, not to mention how inefficient all that starting and stopping is.

So the idea of Autonomous Vehicle Nesting is that hundreds of the little vehicles are loaded at the pharmacy, each with one person’s pills. When the Autonomous UPS truck arrives, all those little vehicles quickly scurry aboard. While the truck is moving, the pill vehicles arrange themselves so when the truck stops, all the pill-vehicles destined for nearby people scurry off to their individual destinations. Each pill-vehicle then goes about its next task, perhaps fetching a freshly picked tomato for your lunch.

This brings some fascinating planning challenges: how many stops should the truck make? What route should it follow? When does it have to leave to get all the pills out in time for breakfast? How many trucks to do we need? How may pill-vehicles? This calls for some serious optimization programs. That’s the sort of challenge the Optimal Adaptive Routing & Scheduling, or OARS, system addresses – more later.

As we talk about how Sustainable Communities will work, we will also consider questions like how close together do you space the pharmacies, what kind of transportation systems are best, and what’s the best shape for a community to take advantage of these new transportation opportunities.

My particular interest is in very large systems, which is why I joined Bell Labs right after getting my PhD – the telephone network was the largest private system in the world. AT&T passed 1,000,000 employees shortly after I joined. Also Bell Labs was THE place to be for industrial research.

In telephone transmission systems, we bundled, or multiplexed, traffic together in groups of increasing size – another challenging optimization. The problem was that we couldn’t move traffic from one bundle to another without demultiplexing the whole group.

Autonomous Vehicle Nesting solves that problem for transportation! And when combined with Continuous Convoys and En Route Sequencing, we have the efficiencies of high-speed express travel but with the convenience of local travel.

As I’ve indicated in the diagram, I predict that there will be several layers of nesting.

This 6” Truck controlled from your iPhone, available on Amazon for $11.99, could easily carry your breakfast pills, or your lunch tomato.

There are already over 6 million autonomous vehicles in use – more accurately, they are Autonomous Actors, that is they are designed to autonomously carry out other functions than serve as vehicles – I’m referring to iRobot’s Rumba vacuum cleaners. We have one, and I get a giddy pleasure from turning it on and leaving, knowing that when I come back the floor will be clean. Of course curious cats have already co-opted these vacuums as feline transport.

Another widely adopted autonomous vehicle, at least in warehouses, is by Kiva Systems, which was bought last year by Amazon.com. These devices bring shelves full of the appropriate goods to a person who selects them and packs them for shipping. These Kiva-sized vehicles seem to me to be nearly ideal for carrying people in chairs.

Autonomous Nesting could easily work with these 3: with the pills on the truck, the truck on a Roomba, and the Roomba on a shelf carried by a Kiva.

Presumably pill-trucks would be better shaped to carry their cargoes. And the Roomba-sized vehicles would move faster, in straighter lines, and have a carrier to accommodate a couple dozen of the pill-trucks. And the Kiva-sized vehicle would go faster, and have a carrier for more Roomba-sized vehicles. And the carriers would allow the units within them to move about to implement  En Route Sequencing in Continuous Convoys. And then we would have even larger, faster vehicles to carry these nests.