I’ve been driving big trucks since shortly after my 21st birthday in 1980 and I always figured I’d be able to stay on the road until retirement. Now I’m not so sure. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Daimler, Tesla, Uber, Ford and Toyota are all investing billions of dollars in driverless vehicles.
Once the purview of science fiction, exoskeletons are slowly working their way into real life. These aids are now being used on manufacturing assembly lines.
Earlier this year, the International Transport Forum (ITF) published a report on global action and legal issues pertaining to the transition to driverless trucks. While technology and innovation move at a swift pace, indeed regulatory and infrastructure changes will lag a few years behind.
A few years ago, Amazon.com Inc. triggered a robot arms race when it purchased a company called Kiva Systems, maker of automated warehouse robots. Now its would-be rivals are landing bigger and bigger cash injections to try to compete with the e-commerce giant.
The singularly defining moment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) — even bigger than when IBM's Deep Blue beat chess master Garry Kasparov — happened back in in 2011 when the unbeatable Jeopardy! Champion Ken Jennings was finally taken down by IBM's new supercomputer, Watson.
The new purported norm created by Amazon's two-day shipping hits two key groups of stakeholders — consumers and supply chain service and equipment providers — differently. How the latter respond is critically important to business success.
A robotic material handling unit zips through a global toy manufacturer's six-story distribution center. As the unit retrieves an open-top plastic container filled with freshly molded toy planes from an automatic storage and retrieval system (ASRS), sparks from a frayed electrical cable on the robot fly everywhere, igniting both the toy planes and the plastic container in which they are stored.
Baidu President Ya-Qin Zhang has a mild-mannered style at odds with his bold goals for "Apollo," the fast-growing, open-source self-driving car platform the Chinese tech giant launched in July.