Nesting Autonomous Containers

You may have noticed that the illustrations of Autonomous Chairs show an empty space under the seat. The Mobility Platform carrying Charlie’s Chair has the capacity to carry more weight. So we can put additional things under Charlie’s Chair. For example, Charlie could take home the leftovers from dinner, on the mail he picked up on the way to dinner. And if there is still more room we could put other things under his chair as well, such as his medications for the evening, and an after dinner drink. This adds little weight to the load, and thus is carried almost for free. This improves the economics by sharing the Energy and investment even more broadly. This sharing also reduces congestion in the hallways, because we don’t need extra vehicles moving around to deliver meals and medications.

This Nesting is handy when you are out running several errands at once. And, with Autonomous Vehicles, you don’t have to carry everything with you: you can place things in an Autonomous Vehicle and send them home, or wherever you want them to go. If you are shopping for several different people you can send the gifts to them directly after you buy them.

Another application of Nesting is placing several of the same size Containers inside a larger Container. In this case, we see a number, in this illustration 18, of different Containers with medications placed into the larger Container.

Nesting can be used recursively, placing Containers inside other Containers, and then inside yet other Containers. Here we see the Container with 18 Medication Containers, being the same size as that containing Wanda’s Water, and those can be grouped into yet a larger Container.

If all the Containers are going to the same location then it makes sense to put them directly into a larger Container, for example, sending a Container Full of orange juice Containers to a grocery store.

Or if the Containers are going to different locations, there is another alternative. We can load the Containers and their Mobility Platforms inside another container, as shown below.

Here is an example of using the ability to nest Containers and Mobility Platforms for local delivery. We begin with Charlie in his chair headed for home. If Charlie is taking his own Medicine and Water home the Containers can be put under his chair and he just takes them out when he gets home. But suppose the Medicine is destined for Megan, and the Water is for Wanda. On his way home, Charlie will pass Wanda’s Shop and the Hotel where Megan is staying for tonight.

As Charlie’s Chair passes Wanda’s Shop, the Mobility Carrier with her water leaves the Container under Charlie’s Chair and delivers her water. Similarly, Megan’s Medicine gets delivered to the Hotel where she is staying tonight.  Clearly this is a simplified example, and I have glossed over many details. Hopefully, however, this has illustrated the value of Nesting, and of including Mobility Carriers inside larger Containers.

Here is an example where you might choose whether or not to use Mobility Platforms inside the larger Containers. We have 4 farms, each one growing a different crop: tomatoes, green peppers, onions, and eggplants. In this example, people have ordered either a single vegetable, or more than one, depending on what they are fixing for dinner tonight, so each vegetable is placed in a separate Container.

Each farm combines the individual vegetable Containers into larger Containers and sends them off. At a nearby transportation hub, the individual Containers are sorted into larger Containers again to go off in the appropriate direction: North, South, East, or West. Because the transportation center ships a lot of vegetables, it makes sense to have sorting equipment to route the individual Containers. Depending on how far the vegetables are going, the outgoing vegetable Containers might be placed on individual Mobility Platforms inside the larger Containers or sent packed together as shown here. This illustrates the flexibility of the system to optimize efficiency.

My daughter raised the issue of how to protect fragile vegetables. For example, if the tomatoes are Rutgers 250’s, the famous New Jersey tomato that has been recovered by Rutgers scientists, they need careful handling. [New Jersey Tomato, Victim of Modern Farming, Vies for a Comeback NY Times, accessed 5/10/2016.] The tomatoes have great taste and texture, but are too fragile to ship using current methods, so the originals died of neglect, in favor of tougher tasteless tomatoes. 

Containers will be a key area of innovation to provide protection, for example, gently holding the contents and absorbing shocks. Today, boxes are frequently dropped and thrown going from farm to truck to warehouse to store. An area of innovation with Autonomous Transportation is minimizing shocks in the entire system – we will describe techniques in detail later.

Another issue my daughter raised is keeping the vegetable Containers clean. Containers can be optimized to both protect the vegetables and to stay clean. One approach to cleanliness is materials that resist contamination. Cleaning these after they deliver a vegetable might be accomplished by holding them upside down and shaking, or blowing them out with air, or more thorough cleaning may be needed, or even sterilization, depending on test results. The type of cleaning needed can be determined by appropriate testing, and may also depend on what they will be carrying next. 

Automated testing is advancing at an amazing pace, for example, with the development of single chips that perform what once required an entire laboratory of expensive equipment. Thus testing for ripeness, freedom from pests and disease can now be done rapidly and inexpensively. You can even assure that the fruit or vegetable is not only healthy, but exactly the variety you ordered.