Adaptive Motion Group

1. What factors are involved in the process of developing intelligent transportation solutions?

The essential factors in building an intelligent transportation solution include the accuracy of positioning, the safety capabilities associated with individual sensing, and the orchestration capabilities due to coordination. One of the most important factors has been the lack of accuracy associated with GPS especially in urban canyons. A lack of satellite connectivity in cities hinders coordination in terms of efficient way-finding and path planning. Dependence on GPS also limits the potential of ongoing research efforts into coordinated movement and predictive braking.

2. What are some of the prevalent use-cases of AMG’s autonomous robotics technologies in AI applications?

One of the most important capabilities is enabling vehicle to vehicle behaviors for reactive safety. These V2V capabilities enable cars to form a swarm much like a flock of birds or school of fish. This is accomplished by adding a small IOT device to each vehicle so that the vehicles can not only communicate with each other but also calculate relative positioning to each other through a time of flight.

3. Your goal is: To create robots and transportation solutions that change the way in which we live, move, understand ourselves and get important things done.

Can you please explain your ideas and initiatives on this?

Better positioning enables everything to be more efficient. The benefits which our society achieved, by deploying GPS is a historical example of this, but we need to take the next leap by creating micropositioning. Micropositioning will allow all kinds of things including robots to be more reliable and efficient. The secret to achieving the value of robots is building solutions from a human perspective so that we achieve not only efficiency but also enjoy the solution.

4. You are taking proven technology for positioning and autonomy into transportation and a variety of industrial smart mobility applications.
Can you share with us a technology roadmap for this initiative?

The idea is to start by embedding micropositioning into industrial environments which tend to be closed settings where infrastructure can be easily modified. Factory floors and sorting centers make excellent proving grounds. Once the technology is proven within these contexts it is natural to extend it to new developments and neighborhoods and eventually into large cities.

5. How Adaptive Motion Group is boosting the AI and IOT connectivity for safer and more efficient cities?

By adding peer to peer positioning technology to light posts and traffic lights it is possible to enhance GPS and enable better positioning for ridesharing and way-finding. Secondarily for cars which have enhanced capability it is also possible to provide connected vehicle capabilities and, in the future, more reliable autonomy.

6. What are some of the human-machine interaction issues during the design process? How are they resolved?

Many companies in this space are trying to jump right to full autonomy. This is an exciting pursuit but we believe the best way to get to a smart car is to start with a smart road. In other words, we must consider the system level issues rather than just the individual vehicle. A smart road can support not only fully autonomous cars but also human drivers. With a smart road the human and the autonomous system become peers that can move together in unison and bound the errors made by either human or machine. Ultimately, we want all agents on the road, whether human or machine, to be caught within the same framework of safe interaction.

7. How does AMG work with customers to adapt intelligent vehicle solutions?

The key is that we start with a universal position solution and a reusable AI software package that allows us to port to many different vehicles. However, depending on the needs of the customer we can also customize the parameters to achieve very different behavior. Each customer and each system can end up uniquely suited to the purpose.