Collaborate Disseminate
For as popular as they became during the COVID-19 lockdowns, grocery delivery services like InstaCart rely on a basic assumption to work: that customers know exactly what they want when …read more Continue reading Automate the Freight: The Convenience Store That Comes to Your Door
The UK will get its first full-size autonomous bus service this summer, if final road testing that begins in the next two weeks goes according to plan. Known as Project …read more Continue reading Automate the Freight: Autonomous Buses to Start Operation in UK
It is by no means an overstatement to say that life as we know it would grind to a halt without cargo ships. If any doubt remained about that fact, …read more Continue reading Automate the Freight: Autonomous Ships Look for Their Niche
On yet another one of those long, pointless road trips that seemed to punctuate my life starting when I got my license, I was plying the roads somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania with a friend. He told me that on long trips he’d often relieve the boredom by finding another car …read more
Before I got a license and a car, getting to and from high school was an ordeal. The hour-long bus ride was awful, as one would expect when sixty adolescents are crammed together with minimal supervision. Avoiding the realities going on around me was a constant chore, aided by frequent …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: When the Freight is People
It should come as no surprise that we here at Hackaday are big boosters of autonomous systems like self-driving vehicles. That’s not to say we’re without a healthy degree of skepticism, and indeed, the whole point of the “Automate the Freight” series is that economic forces will create powerful incentives …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Autonomous Delivery Hits the Mainstream
In the “Automate the Freight” series, I’ve concentrated on stories that reflect my premise that the killer app for self-driving vehicles will not be private passenger cars, but will more likely be the mundane but necessary task of toting things from place to place. The economics of replacing thousands of …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Amazon’s Robotic Packaging Lines
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Shipping Containers Sorted by Robot Stevedores
Ships at sea are literally islands unto themselves. If what you need isn’t on board, good luck getting it in the middle of the Pacific. As such, most ships are really well equipped with spare parts and even with raw materials and the tools needed to fabricate most of what they can’t store, and mariners are famed for their ability to make do with what they’ve got.
But as self-sufficient as a ship at sea might be, the unexpected can always happen. A vital system could fail for lack of a simple spare part, at best resulting in a delay …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Maritime Drone Deliveries
Being a cop’s kid leaves you with a lot of vivid memories. My dad was a Connecticut State Trooper for over twenty years, and because of the small size of the state, he was essentially on duty at all times. His cruiser was very much the family vehicle, and like all police vehicles, it was loaded with the tools of the trade. Chief among them was the VHF two-way radio, which I’d listen to during long car rides, hearing troopers dispatched to this accident or calling in that traffic stop.
One very common call was the blood relay — Greenwich …read more
Continue reading Automate the Freight: Medical Deliveries by Drone