Are Robot Cities the Future of Cities?
The fourth industrial revolution — the fusion of the physical, digital and biological with the use of robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things — is closer than we think. The proof is in the pudding, or, in this case, the robotic cities. With a growing global population, challenges arise in the economic, social and healthcare domains. Enter robots, automating a number of functions previously performed by humans.
Robotics are currently incorporated in a number of areas of life, from traffic systems to delivery services to healthcare management. Governments are starting to get on board as well. Many large cities across the globe — including Seoul, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Singapore, Dubai, London and San Francisco — are testing autonomous vehicles, the so-called “self-driving cars.” In a number of cities, automation is taking over many aspects of industrial shipping and manufacturing, with automated ports and robotised warehouses.
Other examples include autonomous drones delivering parcels, automated pharmacists and service robots inside stores. That means that urban automation, whether or not we’ve noticed, is already here. It has become in the norm in some industries, such as healthcare, while others are still ways away from using the technology. To understand what our future will look like, The Conversation analysed three cities in a recent article.
Google self-driving car in Mountain View, California.
With the Olympic Games of 2020 approaching, Tokyo plans to reveal new robotic technologies. Japan’s government has an agency dedicated to everything related to the fourth industrial revolution — the Robot Revolution Realisation Council, established in 2014.
Expecting an international audience during the Olympics, the nation plans to roll out its robot taxis that transport visitors in Tokyo, smart wheelchairs that can meet Paralympians at the airport, and various service robots with multilingual capabilities used for facilitating communications with and for foreigners.
Singapore, on the other hand, is already a “smart city” — using data and technology to create an efficient, sustainable economic environment, facilitating and improving the government’s operations and enhancing the quality of life for its citizens. Singapore continuously works to extend the existing smart urban ecosystem, currently with autonomous delivery robots and driverless bus shuttles.
With goals of improving management and control of city systems, Singapore already has service robots that clean hotel rooms. The city is also looking into educational robots in a pilot program.
In Dubai, the focus is on the robotisation of the public services, including transportation and policing. Dubai has an ambitious objective of automating 25% of its transportation and 25% of the police force by 2030. The latter — a humanoid police officer — is currently being tested.
New technologies are also a part of the space nation Asgardia. For example, the nation stores its documents on its satellite, Asgardia-1, and is planning to roll out its own cryptocurrency, the Solar.
The Conversation concludes its analysis that at the moment, the future of robotics depends on each specific government’s focus — which we already see in Singapore’s focus on expanding its “smart city” capabilities, Tokyo’s involvement on robotisation, and Dubai’s aspirations to become entirely crime-free.
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