Ramblings from an Automation Mad Man (A Blog Series)
By Jerry Maldonado - VP of Automation, Customer Lifecycle Solutions
What does the Iot , automation , and your car have in common?
Well if you have seen some of the news coming out of CES 2015, the concept of the connected car is a hot one for this year for a variety of reasons. For one, there’s the trendy cool new tech coming out on the market. Secondly, the production ready self-driving vehicles on display during the show. Lastly, the lawyers that are jumping up and looking a legislation for and against self-driving cars. You know that once the lawyers get involved in the market and the technology, we are going to see new and exciting things.
This year at CES 2015 companies like Nvidia , yes the company that produces some of the hottest video cards for gamers on the plane announced a system dedicated for the automotive market called The Drive PX platform. This system allows for more sophisticated driver assistance by leveraging the capabilities for over the air updates. This means that the system transforms how a car might see, think and learn. For example, the system will enable the car to understand the difference between a street sign, stop sign, cop car and truck and feed that information to a process automation engine to perform a function such as the capabilities of self-drive.
Audi was also another showstopper this year with its A7 that self-drove approximately 550 miles from California’s Silicon Valley to Las Vegas. The test car named “JACK” used a combination of radar sensors, two laser scanners, a 3d camera and four additional cameras mounted on the car. All these points of data were fed into a process automation engine that allowed the car to pass slower traffic and successfully operate the vehicle safely at speeds of up to 70 mph.We know that other self-driving cars have been in the works such as the ones from Google, BMW, and Volkswagen. It’s inevitable that the future of the connected car will soon be upon us. But what does this mean to the general population and more importantly to the lawyers and the government?
In general the concept of automated vehicles or the computer direction of a motor vehicle’s steering, braking, and accelerating without real-time input from one of us humans is most likely legal. But in California and Massachusetts, these self-driving cars must have a live breathing human in the driver’s seat at all times. In fact, the law maintains that a licensed human must have the capability of controlling the car at all time. It is only recently that we are hearing and seeing more defined changes to the law as it directly relates to self-driving Cars. I mean who are they going to issue a speeding ticket to … the car?
We still have a long way to go to facilitate everyday usage of the self-driving car and the technology behind it. The automation engineers still have the hurdles to overcome such as how the vehicle will handle in urban locations, under heavy traffic, in a rain storm, etc. Engineers will also need to keep up with technology as new devices will need to be created and updated with software constantly rewritten and reams and reams of data consumed and analyzed every millisecond. But it is kind of cool to think that in the not so distant future I can finally go out and enjoy my favorite NFL team’s victory in the Super Bowl, imbibe in some adult beverages and some spicy food and know that I will get home safely. All it would take is to get into my car and tell the computer, “Hey Jack, I’m not feeling up to drive do you think you can get us home?” Jack will respond, “Why certainly sir, should we stop on the way for some Alka seltzers and a bottle of water? That’s a great idea jack and while you’re at it, could you call the smart home and verify that I have enough saltine crackers for the morning?
Follow the Ramblings of an Automated Mad Man every Wednesday. Did you miss last week's post? Read it here: Shopping in an Automated World