SAE International and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) are offering a new book on autonomous technologies and how they are being applied now, and their future use.
'Autonomous Technologies: Applications That Matter,' assists readers in identifying profitable opportunities and avoiding costly misconceptions with respect to civilian applications of autonomous vehicle technologies as it brings together chapters on how air, water, and ground vehicles are becoming ever more used and appreciated.
Over the years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Challenges in the United States have galvanized interest in autonomous cars, making them a real possibility in the mind of the public, but autonomous and unmanned vehicles have been increasingly employed in many roles on the ground, in the water, and in the air.
Military applications have received a great deal of attention, with drones being the most prominent. However, unmanned vehicles with varying degrees of autonomy already have many civilian applications. Some of these are quite familiar (such as the autonomous vacuum cleaner), while others remain largely out of the public eye (such as autonomous farm equipment). Additional applications and more capable vehicles are rapidly coming to the markets in the years ahead. This book examines a number of economically important areas in which unmanned and autonomous vehicles, also understood here as autonomous technologies, are already used or soon will be.
