More self-driving news, in the warehouse!
Technology rarely gets into the market where we planned or thought it would. As of 2022, self-driving individual cars and taxis are still in prototype mode worldwide (although now legal in a few regions from China to California).
But if quite underwhelming in regards to the industry's grand expectations during the last five years, this technology generated many sprouts in markets tangential to mobility.
One of them being supply chain and logistics.
Amazon announced the launch of Proteus, its first fully autonomous mobile robot, now working in the same physical space as human employees (not in an insulated zone).
Difficult to paint this as an overnight leapfrog when Amazon has been investing and innovating in supply chain automation for over a decade. But you might also consider this move as relatively trivial. It's not and has the potential to change forever how manual tasks are now, not automated but augmented in real-time by robots. Subtle and yet, a powerful paradigm shift.
This illustrates quite well the famous Bill Gates quote:
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
