On a cloudy day in November, a Kia Soul pulled out of the Adenauer parking lot on Kirchberg and joined the flow of traffic, all by itself. This made it the first time a single-family autonomous car drove on a public road in Luxembourg with members of the public as passengers.
Car accidents are one of the leading causes of avoidable deaths in Europe, and despite numbers falling in recent years, there were still almost 20,000 people who lost their lives in 2021 as a result. It’s a problem that has many proposed solutions under way, with the EU aiming to reduce the number of deaths and serious injury by 50% by 2030, and to zero by 2050. This kind of world is hopefully one that will be our future, and SnT researchers are finding ways to bring it closer to a reality.
Robots are becoming more and more present in our world – and in 2019, American robotics manufacturer Boston Dynamics released one that had the potential to overhaul the construction industry. Affectionately named ‘Spot’, the robot is intuitive and can inspect dangerous or remote environments, collecting data as it goes to feedback along its journey.
We’re living in a world now where most of the items surrounding us are ‘smart’ – they operate autonomously, respond when we talk to them and even predict our behaviour. That includes our cars. The safety of our cars no longer rests solely on you – the driver or keeper of the keys – but now also on the engineers producing the software of the internal computer.
Advancements in robotics over the last couple of decades have paved the way for useful real-world applications for robots – yet before entrusting them with key tasks, we need to ensure that these systems are safe to use, and secure from external threats (such as hacking).
The device you are using to read this article is based on a centralised, monolithic architecture – a processor core steering a number of other components into executing tasks. Most of our technological systems work this way, because it’s us humans who lead, telling them what to do – we are the intelligence.