Automation — Shaping the Future from How we Drive to How we Park
Automation and automobiles, both are connected. With ‘auto’ being a common aspect, the future holds a lot of promise that will connect them further.
The word automation is often associated with increasing efficiency, reducing cost, error and human effort and also upping the convenience factor. A part of automating services and industries includes transforming all key stakeholder industries the ‘smart’ way. There are new conjectures, theories and predictions thrown towards us almost every other day. Following their implementation, we think of ways how they will impact or improve our personal lives. In this article, we will keep the focus on the automobile industry and the aspects that are an innate part of this industry.
Let us take Elon Musk’s latest endeavor to improvise on the existing scene of daily commute and traffic-
His new venture called The Boring Company seeks to build tunnels at a lower cost but at a much quicker pace to decongest roads and cut down on the travel costs. If things go as planned for the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and now The Boring Company, the first phase of this ambitious construction project will kick off this year in Chicago.
To get a better hang of things and to understand the impact automation has already made and will make in the future, let us see how far we have come and where are we headed to:
Self-Driven Cars or Autonomous Driving
The thing that comes to mind, when discussing automation and the future of cars are self-driven cars. The idea of such cars might seem like a recent thought that crossed the mind of a business-magnate but you will be surprised to know the real truth.
It started in the 1970s when the first prototype of a driverless car was designed but the existing technology at that time was not in favor.
In the next phase that is now, Google, Tesla, Audi, Uber and other influential names are brainstorming and trying their best to make self-driven cars possible and within the reach of people in the next years to come.
Once these cars hit showroom floors and eventually the roads, daily commute and parking will be revolutionized.
Automated Garages and Parking Facilities
Audi is working with the city of Somerville to start full-fledged automated parking garages replete with sensors, lasers for scanning cars and robotic valet and progress in that direction are underway.
These garages require minimum space to maximize capacity for parked cars within a multi-storey complex. Since all the work is done by robots and machines and there is almost zero human effort required here, an individual can retrieve his/her vehicle from such a facility in a matter of 3 to 5 minutes or even lesser.
Like Somerville, a similar project is underway in Kuwait and other parts of the world.
These compact facilities that help save a lot of space are helping urban planners allocate more space for green areas, retail or residential complexes.
Parking Assistance
Parallel parking used to be a nightmare for rookie and even seasoned drivers alike. However now, Ford, Toyota, Jaguar and Lexus have car models that come with active parking assist. Features include ability to detect spots and reverse parallel park on their own. The mechanism involves a computer working in sync with the front and rear cameras to estimate the size of a parking space and navigate the vehicle accordingly.
Parking Apps
As of now, technology has taken over regular travel and parking to provide a better and hassle-free experience for car parking. An example here is the introduction of parking apps to find car parking spaces. These apps allow drivers to find and book available parking spaces in their desired areas in advance. As a result, drivers need not expend time and fuel navigating the roads to find a spot to park their vehicle.
There are apps wherein individuals who have some space to rent out for this purpose can do so to earn some money. Rates are usually decided by the users on a per hour basis, but this feature varies depending on the interface and operating model of the app being used.
Here are a few apps that you can use right now for parking assistance:
Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things that aims to seamlessly connect devices and things of our day to day use is also one of the driving factors for automation in general and for the future of cars. Self-driven or autonomous cars will become increasingly smart and will be connected to a number of other devices through IoT. This is a growing trend whose number of connected devices stood at something between 8 to 10 billion in 2012, and this figure, i.e. the number of things connected through the internet will rise to 24 billion by 2020 .
Having said that, we are headed towards a future where self-driven cars will drop off their humans where they need to be dropped and then park themselves through a parking app connected to its system or drive off to the nearest automated parking facility until it is summoned again to pick the human. The road to that destination is dotted with a lot of ups and downs- some of these are related to the technology and the others include the opposition put up by individuals who fear depending too much on machines will have a negative impact on several industries. These are mostly the service based industries that could be at the risk of losing their business.
So, to sum things up, we are looking towards better control and increased efficiency and performance when these developments that are currently in progress reach completion, and thanks to the efforts and brain power being dedicated here, that stage is not too far from now. We just hope that we can strike the right balance with automation and related technologies so that it adds more value to everyone’s lives.
Originally published at medium.com.
