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.


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.
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