IoT global round-up: India sets out stall to be world leader in smart cities
This week in the world of IoT, India’s government set out its stall as a global player in smart cities, while Mercedes promises autonomous taxis pretty soon.
Within the world of the internet of things (IoT), London received much of the focus this week for its first efforts to autonomies its public transport with trials for a new bus in the city.
Developed as part of the GATEway Project, the autonomous bus is designed to carry a small number of passengers from areas on the outskirts of the city to major public transport hubs.
As part of its first tests this month, the bus will travel a route of 2km in Canary Wharf with a supervisor on board just to make sure the bus does everything it is supposed to.
The GATEway Project expects to welcome the first paying passengers on board in 2019, with a possibility for expanding to other UK cities.
Meanwhile, within industrial IoT, General Motors revealed it was planning to build and connect more of its robotic force online in a bid to ramp up production.
Mark Franks, director of global automation, recently spoke of the 100 potential failures of its assembly robots, which were avoided by GM after analysing data sent to external servers in the cloud.
“If we can avoid a disruption in our manufacturing, we can save ourselves a significant amount of money,” Franks said. “It’s a pretty good payback.”
While the plan to build a smart city 10 times the size of Singapore in India seemingly never materialised, the country’s government is still planning to spend heavily on making its existing cities just as smart. Read more…