The
recent news about General Motors' 500 million dollars investment in Lyft, laid out GM's plans to develop an on-demand network of
self-driving cars with the ride-sharing service. "We think our business and personal mobility will
change more in the next five years than the last 50," GM President Dan
Ammann said in an interview with Reuters. The announcement came as Toyota
Motor Corp and Ford Motor Co said they would adopt the same software to link
smartphone apps to vehicle dashboard screens. Toyota and Ford, two of the
world's biggest automakers, invited rival car companies to join them to counter
the push by Apple, Alphabet, Tesla Motors Inc and others into self-driving
cars, or what the industry calls autonomous vehicles. So, it is time to warm up
the discussion about driverless cars' use in waste management and recycling
issues. And as you probably imagine, driverless cars fit perfectLy with robotics and artificial intelligence.
Robotics
Robots
are already here. More than 22 millions of them are in use in several
industrial applications, continuously working and connected to the Web.
Although they have been proved both much more difficult and expensive than it
was initially expected, the combination of robots with the new sensors and the
advances of artificial intelligence have set the scene for an exponential
growth of robotics within next 5-10 years.
Robots
are already in use in the waste management industry. Back to 2010, Mitsubishi
and Osaka University researchers presented a robot that identifies different
plastic materials among rubbish and sorts them into piles. SADAKO in Spain has
created a commercial model (Wall-B) able to sort mixed household waste, equipped with a
suction system adapted to small, light and very heterogeneous target objects.
The Finnish company Zen Robotics is focused in C&D waste, with its robot
capable of replacing up to 15 human waste sorters. VOLVO is currently
working on a joint venture to develop a robot that interacts with the refuse
truck and its driver to accomplish the work.
The
potential benefits of using robots are countless but it seems that their use
will be controversial: robots will replace hundreds of thousands or even
millions of workers in recycling and waste management, creating a huge negative
social impact and intense conflicts.
Artificial Intelligence, driverless cars and drones
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) is already reshaping our lives. Either it is the rapid
response of Google to any search we made or the speech recognition, AI has
become a business as usual element of the daily lives of billions. Driverless
cars and drones are equipped with advanced AI systems that are working in
combination with powerful sensors. Their evolution goes really fast.
It
is no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars
that take the driving out of your hands altogether. These cars will be safer,
cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. Yet, there are
several issues to be resolved, but it seems that we are on the way to resolve
them. If the experts are right, the most important problems will be managed
before 2020.
Google
recently announced that by 2017 they would start to deliver packages with
drones, on a massive scale. Amazon has already published its first efforts to
use drones for delivering its products. The US Federal Aviation Agency is
working hard to complete a drones traffic management system until the end of
2016 and the first US database with legally licensed drones will be completed
next month.
Driverless
collection of recyclables will not be that difficult in certain parts of the
world. And if you imagine a drone delivering your supermarket supplies to your
window and taking back your recyclables, you probably are close to a reality
that’s on the way.
The
consequences to traditional waste management will be tremendous. On demand
hybrid collection services will become mainstream and the road towards a
completely automatic and auto-optimized collection system will open. Important
cost reduction is expected by the use of drones and driverless cars, but first
there must be substantial investments. But, there is a high risk of more or
less jobless collection and recycling systems, especially in the most
technologically advanced places of the world.
However, there is a very interesting comment on the future of driverless cars. Dave
King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University, in a
recent interview at Washington Post mentions that the future of driverless cars is not going to be like we think. Well, let's continue the debate...
