4 minute read
Ola Rollén
LEADERS' OUTLOOK
ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
Automation and Autonomy in the Future
BY OLA ROLLÉN
President & CEO, Hexagon AB
In looking ahead to 2031, we first need to look back at digital transformation over the last 20 years. It’s fascinating to see the number of consumer services that have been digitalized. The big developments in the last 20 years started with the internet and today we have entire catalogs of our favorite music and movies online. There has been a great deal of change in retail too. Companies like Amazon deliver groceries to one’s doorstep within two hours. And in Germany, Mercedes has permission to run autonomous vehicles across the country.
So, what’s going to happen in the next 10-15 years? The changes in retail are going to come to business eventually. That’s why it’s important to talk about autonomy as opposed to automation. Autonomy is about automating workflows while also removing the human element from the workflow. For example, fatalities and severe injuries related to traffic accidents every year are in the millions. These numbers can be reduced. Humans aren’t particularly good at doing repetitive tasks, so autonomous cars are the future.
But autonomy is to do with much more than driving cars. Autonomous workflows have
come into play in car manufacturing, surveillance operations and public safety. They are present in mining, aerospace, construction, agriculture, oil and gas… everywhere. So the future is automated in most of our industry verticals.
Power of measurements Measurements are the crucial secret brew to automation and autonomy; unless you can measure reality you can’t determine where you are, where you are going, and how far it is to where you are going. You can use measurements to navigate, to position, to determine what to do next, and so on. So, business is no longer about just taking measurements, but also using them to make real-life decisions.
Since computers are likely to make these decisions going forward, geospatial data will hold greater significance than ever before. Computers, or let’s say apps, will use measurements to navigate from point A to B, assisting, for example, in making garment deliveries from brands like H&M and Zara to thousands of households in a city. Dynamic Geographic Information Systems (GIS) will be at the core of all this, combining base maps with sensor information in real time, for example, to optimize last mile delivery routes hour by hour.
Collaboration is the key The deployment of dynamic GIS will happen only if there is greater collaboration between different companies, although we will also see a lot of consolidation. Historically, the companies that made money in GIS were the ones dealing in, hardware and software. In future, the biggest revenue stream is going to come from data itself. For instance, if you have the latest map of downtown London that you update six times per year, you are unbeatable.
What I see in the future is that collaboration will take place in data capture — a market where precious data is sold. Our contribution to that marketplace is HxDR, a platform that allows the convergence and visualization of almost any geospatial or reality capture data for improved collaboration and decision-making, where you can also sell and resell map data (our response to iTunes if you like).
Emergence of artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is an important tool in the automation of workflows. We have developed algorithms that can identify up to
LEADERS' OUTLOOK
97 percent of everything you see when flying over a country or a city. So, we can identify grass and trees, and classify objects as buildings, cars or lamp posts. As a result, you can automate 95 percent of the manual interpretation you had to do, say seven years ago.
AI is not a technology that you can buy in a box and then just deploy, as it is inherently stupid. Where AI plays a role is in automation where humans take decisions based on data input. If that human tells the algorithm ‘this is right, this is wrong’ enough times, then that algorithm will eventually work as well as, or better, than a human.
Focus on sustainability Autonomy is the only way we will achieve sustainability at the scale needed to reverse current trends. And it won’t happen unless businesses can make it happen profitably. Sustainability and profitability must thrive together. We need to find sustainable ways of consuming, generating power, transporting goods, and so on. At Hexagon we have already started working on that. We have a solar park in Spain generating 17 MW of power but, as importantly, we are deploying Hexagon’s technology on site to improve its output. Yield is currently about 20 percent but if we can improve it to 25 percent the global impact will be huge. Similarly, in 2022, we want to get into the wind sector. We want to
operate a wind farm where we deploy our technology to improve the output of wind turbines.
We also have a joint venture with the Bahamas, where the government has set up a sovereign wealth fund to build national wealth. This includes selling carbon rights based on seagrass growth, seagrass being one of the best living carbon capture organisms on the planet. We are using our airborne bathymetric LiDAR technologies to detect, map and capture critical details about this vital habitat, including its extent and composition.
ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
