(Reuters) – Hyundai Motor Co envisions an interactive and partly virtual future it calls “metamobility,” the place a wide range of robotic units work together with people to supply a broad vary of mobility companies, from automated particular person transportation to distant management of robots in “good” factories.
Hyundai executives, led by Chief Executive Euisun Chung, elaborated on that imaginative and prescient in a media briefing at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Buzzwords apart, Hyundai expects to leverage its rising experience in robotics and synthetic intelligence to construct out a future mobility community that hyperlinks human beings in the real world with objects and duties in the virtual world.
The idea is expounded to the so-called metaverse, a time period coined 30 years in the past by creator Neal Stephenson, however which gained consideration just lately when social media firm Facebook modified its identify to Meta Platforms Inc. It refers to shared virtual world environments which individuals can entry through the web, and which might make use of virtual actuality or augmented actuality.
Hyundai supplied a number of examples of the way it may link the metaverse and the real world:
– A car that may be remodeled into a piece house or an leisure room that features a 3D online game platform.
– A “good” manufacturing facility the place people exterior the plant remotely management robots that work together with machines and merchandise inside the plant.
– Automated private transportation units for folks with disabilities or people who wish to preserve social distances whereas touring.
To make all this work, the automaker mentioned it was constructing a Mobility of Things ecosystem that will link modular robotic platforms to carry out totally different mobility companies.
One module referred to as Plug & Drive or PnD is a single-wheel robotics platform that mixes clever steering, braking and suspension with in-wheel electrical drive, cameras and lidar sensors for automated operation.
For bigger logistics duties and different mobility companies, Hyundai can bundle 4 PnD modules, together with one software that pairs with a robotic canine referred to as – what else? – Spot.
(Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
