Autonomous vehicles in slow lane as robots accelerate

While robotics advances at pace in many industrial settings these days, the robotic or autonomous vehicle remains a nebulous prospect for many.

Emily Shao, partner at McKinsey & Co, says the reality is that the widespread adoption of Level 5 autonomous vehicles is decades away from becoming a common reality.  She also clarifies the prevalence of robots as being defined by those that already inhabit and automate warehouses.

Before analyzing the industry trends and the current forecasts more closely for Level 5, fully autonomous vehicles, she asks us to take a step back. That’s because Level 5 autonomy is very challenging–even for humans–to achieve anywhere. For this reason, the industry is focused on Level 4 of autonomy.  So, the focus is on building capabilities on specific operational design domains (ODDs) such as weather, road conditions, specific types of regions, or the time of day.

Shao explains: “An example of an ODD can range from operating on one street from 9am to 5pm when it’s sunny or be as broad as operating any time in a particular city. Humans often don’t wish to drive in particular conditions, and many of these conditions are also difficult for autonomous systems, so it’s also a challenging technical problem to solve to enable the vehicles to operate autonomously anytime, anywhere.”

As well as the need to consider a diverse range of ODDs, she believes commercialization of autonomous vehicles operating in dense, urban environments is a long way off because “the AI, the software and the valuation requires an unlocking of the different ODDs”. This requires the development and evaluation of the hardware, the software and of the safety case to ensure that any specific ODD is safe for the vehicle to drive in.

History of robots

Drew Winter, principal analyst, Informa Tech Automotive Group, and director of content at WardsAuto, then talks about the history behind robots themselves: “The automotive industry has been trying to replace humans with robots for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s automakers such as General Motors spent billions on robots and machine vision systems in an attempt to improve productivity (robots don’t take bathroom breaks or go on vacation) and replace expensive union labor.

“These grand efforts were largely failures for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. The obvious reasons were robots represented a huge initial investment but also massive maintenance and tech support and programming expenses. Malfunctions such as robots painting each other were instant headlines that clobbered stock prices. Instead of making automakers look high-tech, they looked foolish.”

“Robots were also dangerous in the workplace to humans and had to be fenced off. Even then, horrible deaths and injuries have occurred and resulted in lawsuits and bad headlines. A less obvious problem with robots is that when tough times come, you can’t lay them off.”

Robots: finding their place

He explains that robots eventually found their niche in the factory by being tasked to complete difficult, dangerous and complex tasks. For example, “Robots are do body and chassis welding, which is a difficult and dangerous job.” However, they don’t tend to assembly work where humans can do a better job. He therefore foresees similar scenarios occurring with autonomous vehicles.

To read the complete article, visit TU-Automotive.