With so much talk about social networks, E2.0, collaboration etc, it was a nice reminder from Kim Nash about the Internet of Things - sensors , robots, RFID tags etc. As many episodes from my book extracted below show, they are helping us with an amazing range of activities and they are chattering with each other and with us in far greater volume than even the most of social humans do with each other.
- ”On YouTube, you can see a video where the employees at a Zappos
warehouse based in Kentucky actually had a derby for their robots. The winner, not too surprisingly, was a robot named Robotariat, as in Secretariat, the thoroughbred legend who won the Triple Crown in 1973…Instead of having people walking around and looking for ordered items, the robots (from Kiva) do the running around and bring the items to the workers, who check the orders and seal them in shipping boxes.” - “… the wearIT@work project, financed by the European
Union, is piloting wearable technology for aircraft maintenance among other applications. A vest allows maintenance engineers on aircraft to have hands-free access (via a head-mounted display) to data from onboard systems, repair manuals, spare parts availability, and communication with other colleagues.” - “Cities around the world have been enthusiastic sensor adopters. The
city of San Francisco, for example, uses sensors to alert citizens about open parking spots via displays on street signs, or on screens of their smartphones. Stockholm uses sensors to monitor peak-hour traffic. York, Pennsylvania, has sensors that monitor for gunshot sounds to alert emergency services. Cambridge, Massachusetts, has sensors to monitor air quality. Under its BioWatch program, the U.S. Homeland Security Department has been deploying air sensors in several cities to detect the presence of potential biological weapons.” - “(Tony McCormack’s) cows (in Ireland) have transponders that help him customize the quantity and composition of feed for each one. Try doing that manually, when cows eat on average eight times a day. On large farms, farmers use GPS to apply fertilizers more precisely. McCormack gets animated when he describes how he had heard GPS tracking had helped track down stolen tractors being shipped to Poland.”
- “In 1981, the band Styx famously sang “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto” that’s “thank you” in Japanese. They were prescient. Japan is the world’s largest robotics supplier, but most of the robots have been for industrial uses. Japan has more recently been focusing on “service robots,” particularly for care for the aging population. The robot market is expected to total around ¥6.2 trillion in 2025, of which ¥4.2 trillion will likely be linked to day care and nursing.”
- “The (BP) CTO group worked with the maintenance facility in Houma, Louisiana. With trucks and forklifts with heavy payloads coming and going all the time, it can be a dangerous place. Serious injuries and deaths have occurred from people straying. CTO helped develop a state-of-the-art safety system using RFID and ultra-wideband
radio technologies. Staff members and visitors wear badges that relay their locations to a computer system that checks positions against rules for authorized areas and sounds alerts if people enter restricted zones or visitors stray from escorts. Staff, escort, and visitor badges are distinct, with different rules, permissions, and interactions. If a trucker waiting in a safety zone while his truck is being unloaded decides to return to his truck, say, to retrieve his cell phone, as soon as he crosses the yellow line, he hears over a loudspeaker, “Please return to the waiting area; please return to the waiting area. . . .” “ - “Of course, the data from these billions of sensors is leading to opportunities for data mining. Sun Microsystems has developed its Yggdrasil (as in the mythical Norse ash tree whose branches extend to the heavens) framework for use with sensors and other small, wireless, embedded devices. It factors their unique characteristics: limited power, need to operate unattended under harsh environmental conditions, the fact that many devices “sleep” often to conserve energy and wake up periodically for a short time to record and/or transmit sample readings. The Yggdrasil framework is designed to make it easier for field researchers to create applications that collect sensor data over long periods of time—small bursts
of data, but voluminous in aggregate.”
