Drones and Autonomous Vehicle — The New Peripherals of Computing
Drones and Autonomous vehicles (commonly referred as self-driving cars/trucks) are the buzzwords these days that’s fast being transformed into reality. A lot is happening and a lot is being talked. Drones are being used today for Aerial Photography, Geographical Mapping, Crop Monitoring and Other areas where freely operating from sky provides the vantage point and flexibility. On Similar lines, Autonomous Vehicle are positioned to change the way the world is going to move. Though in early stage, its success is going to be a game changer and disruptive for many businesses. From taxi, personal commuting to trucking and for that matter shipping as well, things won’t be the same again.
A key differentiator of this area of innovation is excluding humans out of equation, not from a cost perspective but from the perspective of bringing in Automation and integrating Drones and Autonomous Vehicle directly to digital solution.
With the arrival and advancement of this new piece of autonomous or software controlled hardwares, a totally new capability is being introduced to the world of computing, a capability where existing computing service can be further extended to cross the human barrier. A Software solution that would normally handover the workflow to humans, for certain use cases can now extend it-self to control Drone or Autonomous Vehicle to execute the use case in its totality. Case in point, online retailer like Amazon have pretty much Automated their delivery system so theoretically today they have, or could transform to have the capability where an online order placed by its customer can be automated all the way to be packed and labelled waiting to be shipped from warehouse. There on it must be transitioned to a new workflow that would involve humans to make the actual delivery happen. With Drones and Autonomous Vehicle in picture, whole solution to the shopping experience right from Customer placing order to all the way up to Customer receiving the shipment could be codified as a Digital Solution. The delivery portion of the solution could be integrated using Drones and Autonomous Vehicle. A solution in this model could be end to end tested for Scalability, Reliability and other *ability of a typical software solutions which otherwise is not possible with human being part of the solution.
On a similar lines, services like Uber and Lyft powered by today’s sharing economy have taken advantage of penetration of smart devices to the masses. Technologically powered smart phone carried by every individual gives the likes of Uber and Lyft the required platform and ecosystem to make sharing economy a success story. With Autonomous vehicle, this model can be further perfected. A typical request for a cab through a mobile app can actually run the right algorithm and get an Autonomous Vehicle right at your door step to take you to your destination of choice. Uber has been already investing in this space. In future requesting a pickup or delivering a shipment to a customer would be as similar as firing a print job.
What we are slowly witnessing is a transformation of these both autonomous vehicles to a computer peripheral completely integrated to mainstream computing where it serves both as an input and output device. As an input device, drones have immense potential to feed new stream of valuable data either in form of photography images or through other sensors that could be mounted in Drone, in a similar model Uber’s Movement program, is providing its trip data for Urban Planning. As an output device, they help extend the current capability of computing to transform the output to a transit medium through drones and Autonomous vehicles. The examples cited above are just some pattern to get your thoughts rolling in this directions, the possibilities are immense.
This model will also redefine today’s Automobile Industry. With autonomous vehicle, there would be no longer incentive in owning the vehicle but rather request the service on demand, more into this might be out of the scope of this article but to give you peek into the future, Today’s Toyota’s and Ford’s would take a page out from software industry to provide “Transit as a Service” or probably might give themselves some other catchy term but Idea is that they would transform themselves more into a manufacturer of Peripherals rather than cars and service enable them. So Today’s Toyota’s and Ford’s would mirror themselves into AWS and Azure of tomorrow for a different computing capability.
All said, the capability that Drones and Autonomous Vehicle bring to the table are here to stay and evolve to be completely integrated to mainstream computing, they naturally help to break the barrier that traditional computing has when it comes to inputs and outputs beyond conventional limits. So it’s time to stay tuned to what the future beholds.
