10 Examples Of Automation
People don’t realise the scale of current automation and how much innovation is already implemented in our daily lives, letting us function more efficiently and freely. Machines can now match or outperform humans across a range of activities in a number of industries. Over the next few weeks I will be publishing detailed case studies of automation projects in different industries. But today I’d like to share a quick list of illustrative examples:
1. Space
A space probe with semi-autonomous functionality. For example, a planetary rover might decide to take a particular soil sample. While spacecrafts come in many shapes and sizes and are designed to fulfil separate and specific mission objectives, they share much in common. Future space exploration missions require complex vehicles, habitats, robotic assistants and self-sufficient spacecraft systems which adapt to complex, rapidly changing environments.
Additional exploration technologies for ground and flight operations must include automated planning and scheduling to increase the safety of these missions and reduce their cost.
Automated planning is crucial in order to maximise science return from deep space probes and even terrestrial observing systems, and to complement and enhance the capabilities of humans doing mission operators.
2. Home Appliances
Even before the whole smart home and IoT market exploded, there was the Roomba. Looking more like a squished trash can, iRobot’s flagship product defied your expectations of robots and vacuum cleaners, that can clean a room itself without much need of direction. Nowadays, Roomba can be even automated further with IFTTT (If this then that) by its user. Applets can trigger the robot vacuum to e.g. start when you leave the house and pause cleaning when you answer the phone.
3. Data Cleaning Scripts
The holy grail of data cleaning is a system that does it for you. Smart automation allows us approach this vision from close. Many data science projects and companies follow the process of collecting “dirty” data from a variety of domains, performing extensive data cleaning, and then developing a model. Ideally the data cleaning effort will actually improve the quality of the model. In addition, a huge amount of time is spent addressing simple but tedious errors such as outlier removal, duplicate elimination, imputation, etc. Automation scripts are developed to run at a specific time each day and within specific conditions to clean up disk space on a web server.
4. Self-Driving Vehicle
We have not yet achieved fully automated vehicles, however, there are some interesting developments going on at the moment. There are 5 different levels of driving automation that the automotive industry generally accepts. The levels 0 to 5 are defined according to their relative extent of automation. Level 0, “No Automation”, is where the driver controls the car without any support from a driver assistance system. The situation changes at Level 5 called “Full Automation”, where it’s the car that can drive without any human interaction. Level 3 is “Highly Automated Driving”, where we are currently. The biggest leap from Level 2 to Levels 3 and above is that starting at Level 3, the vehicle itself controls all monitoring of the environment (using sensors like LiDAR). The driver’s attention is still critical at this level, but can disengage from “safety critical” functions like braking and leave it to the technology when conditions are safe. Many current Level 3 vehicles require no human attention to the road at speeds under 37 miles per hour.
5. Hospitality Events Processing
A good automated IoT example here is a hotel room that automatically unlocks the front door when it senses an authorised guest (based on e.g his mobile tools) approaching. Once a customer has booked their stay over the web or call centre they can use their reference details to carry out a number of processes which effectively automate the entire process.
Before arrival at the hotel, similar to an airline check-in service, guests can notify the property of their arrival and complete passport registration for overseas guests, select a room and other services on a platform integrated with hotel’s back-end system.
When the customer actually arrives at the property they either pick up a keycard from a kiosk in the foyer or can use their mobile device (like phone or an e-watch) to unlock the room.
6. IVR
In theory, an Interactive Voice Response system can be a great way to filter customers through the options maze to the right agent, but it’s easy to get it wrong. Probably each of us experienced a situation when saying something like “complain team” was getting you to a completely different department.
It’s one of the scourges of the modern telecommunications age: call centres and their seemingly endless lists of menu options that can keep you hanging on and on for minutes that feel like hours — all at your own expense.
7. Smart Home Notifications
Home automation is exactly what it sounds like: automating the ability to control items around the house — from lighting, window shades to pet feeders — with a simple push of a button (or a voice command). Some activities, like setting up a heating to turn on and off at certain times, are simple and relatively inexpensive. Others, like advanced surveillance cameras, may require a more serious investment of time and money. Technology giants race each other with developing more connected home appliances — such as a refrigerator that decides to notify its owner that a carton of milk appears to have expired.
8. Swarm Robotics
Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multi-robot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. And example may be here a group of very small robots who self-organise to build a custom product to customer specifications.
9. Self-Healing
Proactive versus reactive service is the future of technology at almost every scale. We’re entering times, where service-oriented automated and Internet connected devices are smart enough to detect maintenance needs and security risks. It’s called self-healing technology.
National power grids like S&C have the ability to self-heal, reducing outages and lost revenue for utility companies. Scientists are applying similar concepts to cars and airplanes to make travel safer than ever before. In the future, you might even own a self-healing phone screen made from a “stretchy material” that can fix cracks quickly.
10. Insurance claims processing
For the consumer, dealing with a significant loss is stressful enough without having to manage a complex, lengthy insurance claims process. For the insurer, this period is the critical “moment-of-truth” that could make or break a client relationship. It is imperative that an insurer’s adjudication is streamlined to be quick and accurate. This is where automation and comes in, by using cognition to make the claims handler’s workload more productive, offload administrative functions and adjudicate claims faster. Additionally, powered by AI, system can prevent claims leakage via early fraud detection and prevention.
An example may be an a virtual insurance chat bot that makes it easy for a customer to view the history of submitted claims, including status for current claims and payment information. Customers may also submit a claim over the app after answering a few questions, including clicking on the damaged areas in the car drawings. Once the claim has been submitted, the chat bot indicates that a claims adjuster will follow up with the customer. It also shares a list of local repair shops for the customer to get an estimate. Within minutes, the claim is complete without involving a claims adjuster.
