Small Autonomous Vehicle Evolution

Now that we have enclosed A-Ways, let’s see how far we can go in our pursuit of efficiency by cutting more weight.

Let’s look at Autonomous Vehicles to carry one person.

My father’s experiences with mobility got me started thinking about what Autonomous Vehicles could do to help seniors.

My father loved to walk, but he didn’t like to walk alone, so he stopped his regular walks when my stepmother contracted Parkinson’s Disease and couldn’t walk with him. A “Personal Mobility Vehicle” would have been ideal to help them both. Unfortunately, my stepmother didn’t have the fine motor ability to control a motorized wheelchair. Have you ever tried to navigate among a sea of motorized wheelchairs? You fear for your ankles. So we definitely want Autonomous Vehicles.

Adding autonomous control to these motorized wheelchairs in an obvious solution to both of those problems, and would safely provide personal mobility to millions, and not just seniors; for example children can travel safely (we’ll discuss how to assure safety, security, and privacy in later posts). This led to a whole family of Autonomous Vehicles for personal mobility in different situations. Note the Autonomous Sleeper / Gurney is ideal for long trips, and invaluable in hospitals and all sorts of emergency situations.

My father and stepmother faced other challenges in daily life. They lived in Charlestown, an excellent senior facility in Catonsville, Maryland. Sometimes my stepmother wasn’t up to walking to one of the excellent restaurants for dinner, so they could order their meals delivered, but that took up to half an hour, cost $10, and the food wasn’t hot when it arrived.

My friend David and I had faced a similar problem when we were preparing for a conference presentation late one night in a hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, and we wanted a pizza. We sketched out a system of delivery running along the ceilings of the halls, the top of elevator cars, and entering above the doors.

Autonomous Vehicles offer an easy solution to those problems.

So why not have a small Autonomous Vehicle deliver a pizza, or a box with a full meal. The same Autonomous Vehicles could also deliver mail, flowers, groceries, a book from the library, or most of the things you order from Amazon or other online providers.

An even smaller Autonomous Vehicle could deliver a beverage. Just as microbreweries are revolutionizing beers, custom beverages delivered just when you want them will revolutionize healthy satisfaction. The same size Autonomous Vehicle could also deliver a nice fresh fruit or vegetable, or a vast variety of items.

Another problem my father faced was remembering to take his 21 different medications, on a perplexing variety of different schedules. If transportation is fast and cheap, we can economically deliver exactly those medications you need at a particular time. Your smart device could even track that you actually take the medication, which is another challenge for seniors and others (a major threat for the spread of treatment-resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases, is patients not taking their full dose of medications). Factories could use these small vehicles to move small parts.

A goal that emerges from this search for efficiency and service is:

The Vehicle should weigh less than the Load. 

You probably noticed that the illustrations each show a Container separate from the Vehicle. In this case we call the Autonomous Vehicle a Mobility Platform.

One reason for this design is the incredible success of standardized Cargo Containers in revolutionizing the transport of goods around the world. A Cargo Container can move from a 

factory on a truck, to a railroad car, to a ship, to another railroad car, to a truck, to a store or warehouse without being unpacked and repacked at each transfer.

The Container is optimized for the needs of the contents: size, weight, fragile, heated, cooled, corrosive, washable, or sterilizable. A key feature is that the Containers are reusable.

The Mobility Platform is optimized for the characteristics of the transport mode: steel wheels on steel rails, optimized wheels on newly designed flat A-Way surfaces, air cushion, maglev, or even conventional rubber tires to travel on existing roads. Or the Mobility Platform could be a drone, as Amazon.com is proposing for delivery.

(For more details, see Blog entry “July 3, 2013 Separating the Mobility Platform from the A-Carrier”.)

You may be thinking that this is all too theoretical.

Did you know there are already millions of small Autonomous Vehicles in operation in the US, and you may even have one in your home, I do.

Consider Amazonrobotics (previously called Kiva Systems before Amazon.com bought them). The Autonomous Mobility Platforms pick up and move shelves full of products around the warehouse: bringing just the right shelf to a person to pick whatever you have ordered, and then moving the shelf to an appropriate place in the warehouse. Items that are used frequently are stored near the pickers, and those that aren’t selling as well are moved off to the farther reaches. Thus we have an entire network of Autonomous Vehicles working together in a sophisticated management system.

If you think about the size, weight and shape of the shelves these Mobility Platforms are moving, why couldn’t they also pick up your chair and take you wherever you want to go just as easily?

Now closer to home, I love my Roomba. It is amazingly satisfying to start the Roomba, leave the room, and come back to find the floor completely cleaned. As you can see in the image below, the Roomba easily carries books and other items.

Interestingly, the Roomba goes farther on a unit of electricity than my Chevy Volt did; and the Roomba is also vacuuming the floor.

Another Autonomous navigation device you probably haven’t considered in this light is what I call “Super-Smart Watches”. One of the challenges my father faced later in life was that he could still walk, but once he left home, he couldn’t necessarily find his way back. If he had a Super-Smart Watch it could have led him home. You can imagine extending this to Autonomous Canes, and Autonomous Glasses, a la Google Glass.

So the technology for these Autonomous Vehicles is here, we just need the vision to apply it.

You are probably wondering how these small vehicles can possibly travel far enough, or fast enough, to be any use outside a building or campus. That’s the subject of the next post.