Autonomous things

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Autonomous things, abbreviated AuT, or the Internet of autonomous things, abbreviated as IoAT, is an emerging term [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] for the technological developments that are expected to bring computers into the physical environment as autonomous entities without human direction, freely moving and interacting with humans and other objects.

Self-navigating drones are the first AuT technology in (limited) deployment. [6] [7] It is expected that the first mass-deployment of AuT technologies will be the autonomous car, generally expected to be available around 2020. [8] Other currently expected AuT technologies include home robotics (e.g., machines that provide care for the elderly, [9] [10] infirm or young), and military robots [11] [12] (air, land or sea autonomous machines with information-collection or target-attack capabilities).

AuT technologies share many common traits, which justify the common notation. They are all based on recent breakthroughs in the domains of (deep) machine learning and artificial intelligence. [13] [14] [15] They all require extensive and prompt regulatory developments to specify the requirements from them and to license and manage their deployment [16] (see the further reading below). And they all require unprecedented levels of safety (e.g., automobile safety) and security, [17] [18] [19] to overcome concerns about the potential negative impact of the new technology.

As an example, the autonomous car both addresses the main existing safety issues and creates new issues. It is expected to be much safer than existing vehicles, by eliminating the single most dangerous element –the driver. The US's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 94 percent of US accidents were the result of human error and poor decision-making, including speeding and impaired driving, [20] and the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School claims that "Some ninety percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused at least in part by human error". [21] So while safety standards like the ISO 26262 specify the required safety, there is still a burden on the industry to demonstrate acceptable safety.

While car accidents claim every year 35,000 lives in the US, [22] and 1.25 million worldwide, [23] some[ who? ] believe that even "a car that's 10 times as safe, which means 3,500 people die on the roads each year [in the US alone]" would not be accepted by the public. [20] The acceptable level may be closer to the current figures on aviation accidents and incidents, with under a thousand worldwide deaths in most years [24]  –three orders of magnitude lower than cars. This underscores the unprecedented nature of the safety requirements that will need to be met for cars, with similar levels of safety expected for other Autonomous Things.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-driving car</span> Vehicle operated with reduced human input

A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car incorporating vehicular automation, that is, a ground vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving safely with little or no human input. Self-driving cars combine a variety of sensors to perceive their surroundings, such as thermographic cameras, radar, lidar, sonar, GPS, odometry and inertial measurement units. Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage. Control methods based on artificial intelligence can then be used to learn all the gathered sensory information in order to control the vehicle and support various autonomous-driving tasks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vehicular automation</span> Automation for various purposes of vehicles

Vehicular automation involves the use of mechatronics, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems to assist the operator of a vehicle. These features and the vehicles employing them may be labeled as intelligent or smart. A vehicle using automation for difficult tasks, especially navigation, to ease but not entirely replace human input, may be referred to as semi-autonomous, whereas a vehicle relying solely on automation is called robotic or autonomous. Both of these types are instantiated in today's various self-driving cars, unmanned surface vehicles, autonomous trains, advanced airliner autopilots, drone aircraft, and planetary rovers, as well as guided rockets and missiles. After the invention of the integrated circuit, the sophistication of automation technology increased. Manufacturers and researchers subsequently added a variety of automated functions to automobiles and other vehicles. The technology involved in implementing autonomous vehicles is very expansive, ranging from technological improvements in the vehicle itself to the environment and objects around the vehicle. As the use of automated vehicles increases, they are becoming more influential in human lives. Although automated vehicles bring various benefits, they also come with various concerns. Also, there are still technological challenges that need to be overcome in order to make vehicular automation robust and scalable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniela L. Rus</span> American computer scientist

Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Velodyne Lidar</span> American technology company

Velodyne Lidar is a Silicon Valley-based lidar technology company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics in 2016. As of July 2020, the company has had about 300 customers. Velodyne Lidar ships sensors to mobility industry customers for testing and commercial use in autonomous vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, mapping, robotics, infrastructure and smart city applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Waymo</span> Autonomous car technology company

Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobileye</span> Israeli information technology company

Mobileye Global Inc. is a company developing autonomous driving technologies and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) including cameras, computer chips and software. Mobileye was acquired by Intel in 2017 and went public again in 2022. Mobileye is based in Jerusalem, Israel, and also has sales and marketing offices in Midtown, Manhattan, US; Shanghai, China; Tokyo, Japan; and Düsseldorf, Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of self-driving cars</span> Overview of the history of self-driving cars

Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.

A robotaxi, also known as robo-raxi, self-driving taxi or driverless taxi, is an autonomous car operated for a ridesharing company.

Ottomotto LLC, d/b/a Otto, was an American self-driving technology company founded in January 2016 by Lior Ron and Anthony Levandowski.

Increases in the use of autonomous car technologies are causing incremental shifts in the responsibility of driving, with the primary motivation of reducing the frequency of traffic collisions. Liability for incidents involving self-driving cars is a developing area of law and policy that will determine who is liable when a car causes physical damage to persons or property. As autonomous cars shift the responsibility of driving from humans to autonomous car technology, there is a need for existing liability laws to evolve in order to reasonably identify the appropriate remedies for damage and injury. As higher levels of autonomy are commercially introduced, the insurance industry stands to see higher proportions of commercial and product liability lines, while personal automobile insurance shrinks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Argo AI</span> Autonomous driving technology company

Argo AI was an autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was co-founded in 2016 by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, veterans of the Google and Uber automated driving programs. Argo AI was an independent company that built software, hardware, maps, and cloud-support infrastructure to power self-driving vehicles. Argo was mostly backed by Ford Motor Co. (2017) and the Volkswagen Group (2020).

Oxbotica is an autonomous vehicle software company, headquartered in Oxfordshire, England, and founded by Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner.

Cruise LLC is an American self-driving car company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology. The company is a largely-autonomous subsidiary of General Motors.

A self-driving truck, also known as an autonomous truck, or robo-truck is an application of self-driving car designed to transport cargo without requiring no human driver. Many companies are testing self-driving semi trucks.

Drive.ai, a subsidiary of Apple Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California that uses artificial intelligence to make self-driving systems for cars. It has demonstrated a vehicle driving autonomously with a safety driver only in the passenger seat. To date, the company has raised approximately $77 million in funding. Drive.ai's technology can be modified to turn a vehicle autonomous.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yandex self-driving car</span> Robotaxi project

Yandex self-driving car is a robotaxi project of the Russian-based internet corporation Yandex. The first driverless prototype launched in May 2017. As of 2018, functional service was launched in Russia with prototypes also being tested in Israel and the United States. In 2019, Yandex revealed autonomous delivery robots based on the same technology stack as the company's self-driving cars. Since 2020, autonomous robots have been delivering food, groceries and parcels in Russia and the USA. In 2020, the self-driving project was spun-off into a standalone company under the name of Yandex Self-Driving Group.

Internet of vehicles (IoV) is a network of vehicles equipped with sensors, software, and the technologies that mediate between these with the aim of connecting & exchanging data over the Internet according to agreed standards. IoV evolved from Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks and is expected to ultimately evolve into an "Internet of autonomous vehicles". It is expected that IoV will be one of the enablers for an autonomous, connected, electric, and shared (ACES) Future Mobility.

The impact of self-driving cars is anticipated to be wide-ranging on many areas of daily life. Self-driving cars have been the subject of significant research on their environmental, practical, and lifesyle consequences.

Regulation of self-driving cars is an increasingly relevant topic in the automotive industry strongly related to the success of the actual technology. Multiple countries have passed legaslation and agreed on standards for the introduction of autonomous cars.

References

  1. ↑ "The Internet of Autonomous Things". Archived from the original on April 19, 2017.
  2. ↑ "The Internet-of-Autonomous-Things (IoAT)". ResearchGate.
  3. ↑ "IoT to IoAT: Internet of Autonomous Things devices provides solutions  - Control Engineering". www.controleng.com. April 30, 2016.
  4. ↑ "Big Data Critical in IoT to the Progression from Connected to Autonomous Things – Cloudera VISION". October 20, 2016.
  5. ↑ "Top 10 Tech Trends: Autonomous Agents and Things – IT Products & Solutions". Archived from the original on April 19, 2017. Retrieved April 18, 2017.
  6. ↑ "Watch: How a self-piloting drone works". Newsweek . January 21, 2016.
  7. ↑ "Self-flying drone dips, darts and dives through trees at 30 mph – MIT CSAIL". www.csail.mit.edu.
  8. ↑ "Forecasts – Driverless car market watch". www.driverless-future.com.
  9. ↑ "IBM is working on a robot that takes care of elderly people who live alone". Business Insider .
  10. ↑ Mulligan, Gabriella (March 17, 2017). "Is robotics a solution to the growing needs of the elderly?". BBC News.
  11. ↑ "Autonomous Weapons "Could Be Developed for Use Within Years," Says Arms-Control Group". IEEE Spectrum. April 14, 2016.
  12. ↑ Rosenberg, Matthew; Markoff, John (October 25, 2016). "The Pentagon's 'Terminator Conundrum': Robots That Could Kill on Their Own". The New York Times.
  13. ↑ "Why Deep Learning Is Suddenly Changing Your Life".
  14. ↑ "Turing Learning breakthrough: Computers can now learn from pure observation – ExtremeTech". Extremetech. August 30, 2016.
  15. ↑ Kelly, Kevin. "The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World". Wired.
  16. ↑ Vehicles, California Department of Motor. "Deployment of Autonomous Vehicles for Public Operation". www.dmv.ca.gov.
  17. ↑ "Worried about cybersecurity and the connected car? There's a bill for that". January 26, 2017.
  18. ↑ "Connected cars: security and privacy risks on wheels". iapp.org.
  19. ↑ "A Future Full of Drones – and the Advanced Threats They Present". April 29, 2016.
  20. 1 2 Steven Overly (February 20, 2017). "The big moral dilemma facing self-driving cars". The Washington Post . Retrieved April 18, 2017. "[..] Would we accept that?" asks John Hanson, a spokesman for the Toyota Research Institute, which is developing the automaker's self-driving technology.
  21. ↑ Bryant Walker Smith (December 18, 2013). "Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes" . Retrieved April 18, 2017.
  22. ↑ "Quick Facts 2015". US DOT . Retrieved April 18, 2017.
  23. ↑ "Road traffic deaths". World Health Organization.
  24. ↑ "Death Rate per Year". Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives (ACRO). Retrieved April 18, 2017

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