The Future of Supply Chains

Paul Marks, The Future of Supply Chains, Communications of the ACM, July 2021, Vol. 64, No. 7, Pages 19-21.

Today's supply chains are labor-intensive and expensive to run. A number of autonomous systems that reduce the human factor are about to change all that.

What do the sidewalks around us, the airspace above us, interstate freeways, and deep ocean shipping lanes have in common? The answer is that they are all places where developers of autonomous technology are trying to revolutionize the economics of supply chains. The plan is to use robotic technology to deliver anything from packages to take-out food, groceries, or bulk freight in ways that can reduce the logistics industry's dependence on that most expensive of supply chain costs: human labor. if the use of electric drivetrains can cut carbon emissions too, so much the better.

Some examples: 

Starship's machines are lithium battery-powered, white plastic robots that travel at 5mph (8kph) on six stubby wheels. peppered with cameras, radars, and ultrasound sensors for collision avoidance, they use GPS, computer vision, and proprietary 2.5-cm-resolution maps to navigate. They use AI to continually improve their guidance system as they travel—by retraining a neural network when, for instance, an unmapped obstacle is regularly met on a route. "Our goal has always been to achieve 99% autonomy, and our hardware and software allow us to travel safely autonomously," Harris-Burland says. The goal is not for 100% autonomy, he explained, because a remote human operator can assume radio (4G/5G) control if a robot gets stuck...

One upshot of this extreme-look-ahead technology is that the trucks need to brake far less often, saving fuel. In trials TuSimple's 40-truck fleet is running in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas—with safety drivers who can step in if needed—the company has found, in research verified by the University of California, San Diego, that the autonomous technology is burning up to 10% less fuel per trip than similar human-driven trucks...

"The AI Captain uses a true hybrid AI system, making use of deep learning, prescriptive logic/inference rules, and also optimization/linear programming. And deep learning-based object detection, classification, and tracking is at the heart of the computer vision system used for confirming and identifying navigation hazards," says Don Scott, Marine AI's chief technology officer.

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