Insights

The world is about to experience significant progress in AI-enabled autonomous mobile systems. Could autonomous mobile robots navigating dynamic environments open up new automation opportunities for industry?

Cambridge Consultants' Ram Naidu, Senior Vice President, AI, welcomes attendees to the Innovation Acceleration stage at The AI Summit Silicon Valley 2021, day one. 

They are already physically loading our online shopping baskets, vacuuming our homes and maintaining our lawns. But what will it take for automated and autonomous systems to proliferate across industry and society – on the roads, city streets, building sites, fields, factories, and schools?

With the Cop26 summit in Glasgow providing a noisy, politically charged backdrop via the mainstream media, there was a real sense of relevance and urgency in the air as I contributed to last week’s virtual REAP Conference, organised by Agri-TechE.

It’s a common fallacy that the task of perfecting navigation for robots and autonomous vehicles is relatively straightforward.

The coming world of automated and autonomous machines will transform how we live, travel, work and engage with the world.

This paper explains how ‘turning trash into cash’ provides opportunity for companies to gain first-mover advantage in several fields. With a clear, problem/solution approach, it outlines a method that be considered simply as a way to capture carbon – but is more likely to yield benefits in the creation of valuable bio-derived compounds.

Now don’t be alarmed, but I want to pose a potentially unnerving question: just how safe is artificial intelligence? Those of you of a sensitive disposition might already be recalling images of James Cameron’s self-aware Terminators hunting down humankind in a post-nuclear wasteland.

Extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, wireless connectivity and edge compute are opening up transformative commercial opportunities for all sorts of businesses. Now is the time to seize them. This whitepaper could act as your window on the future – offering as it does a practical guide to navigating the road from automation to autonomy.

Over a series of discussions with clients on sustainability we’ve been building a quick and accessible modelling tool to model the carbon cost implications of typical high-volume products across a variety of markets.

The ambition to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics from the world’s supply chains is of course as laudable as it is essential. I’m proud to be part of a team of colleagues dedicated to doing something about it – by creating a guide that is helping innovators switch to alternatives.

With the world becoming increasingly impatient for a great sustainability reset, last week’s inaugural Rethinking Materials Virtual Summit did a pretty decent job at starting to shape the agenda for innovation in plastics and packaging over the next five or so years.