Robotics

What does it take to commercialize photonic beam steering?

IDTechEx attended AutoSens 2019, the event took place at the car museum in Brussels. This event is focused on all future vehicle perception technologies, including lidar, radar, and camera. In this article, we summarized key learnings around lidar technologies.

Electric vehicles by land, water and air are rapidly arriving and rapidly being misunderstood. Motors last forever? No. We now push motors so hard they wear out, increasing sales.

IDTechEx has issued the first in-depth report on this called, "Robot Shuttles and Autonomous Buses 2020-2040". Robot shuttles are an important new, reconfigurable form of transportation for goods and people that may even function as mobile offices, workshops, restaurants and more.

Last mile delivery is the most expensive part of the delivery chain, often representing more than 50% of the overall cost. This is mainly because it is the least productive and automated step. As such, many are seeking to bring automation into the last mile.

Few of the giant car makers have shown urgency in transitioning away from the internal combustion engine. What's more, the automotive market is set to decline once again in 2019 whilst electrifying newcomers made huge gains in front of sleeping incumbents' noses. Although a large fraction of this is orders (not deliveries), if OEMs do not wake up now, they never will.

The trend of investment in and acquisition of mobile robotic companies seeking to automate the movement of goods within warehouses, fulfilment centres, and manufacturing facilities is still rising.

In the past decade, progress continues in the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies. IDTechEx forecasts that autonomous car and mobitliy services will become a $2.5 trillion market by 2040.

Automation in the delivery/logistic and warehousing/fulfilment chain is a growing market. A particularly exciting subset of this is the use of mobile robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles for automation of movement-based tasks.

Autonomous driving technologies are disrupting the business models for the traditional auto industry. Latest research from IDTechEx forecasts that autonomous driving technologies will accelerate the arrival of peak car sales, in 2031.