We might see helping hand non-driving robots for self-driving cars.
A ridesharing driver the other day aided a passenger that had a leg cast to get into his car.
A mother recently helped her toddler put on a seat-belt and held the hand of her child while taking a short driving journey.
These two everyday occurrences are seemingly innocuous and would not normally merit explicitly being pointed out.
They are noteworthy when you consider the underlying element that runs in-common among these use cases, namely, passengers often require assistance while traveling via a car.
Let’s refer to this assistance as a helping hand.
You might need a helping hand to get into a car.
You might need a helping hand when trying to exit from a car.
At times, during a car journey, you might need a helping hand.
With today’s cars, there is always a human driver at the wheel and therefore a potential helping hand is already baked into car travel.
The driver can possibly get out of the car to open a car door for someone or aid a person to get into the car or offer help while a person is attempting to get out of a car.
In addition, while sitting at the steering wheel, a driver can reach over to provide a limited amount of assistance, though hopefully doing so in a careful way to ensure that their attention is still focused on the driving task. When a car comes up to a red light and assuming that the driver has brought the car to a full and safe stop, the driver can be more lax in their driving focus, allowing them to provide greater assistance within the car, yet presumably still in control of the vehicle.
For true self-driving cars, there won’t be a human driver at the wheel.
All occupants inside a true self-driving car are passengers. And, if there is only one person in a self-driving car, it means they are the only passenger and there isn’t anyone else present. This is an important point. In today’s conventional cars, when there is one passenger there is also another person in the car that’s the driver of the car.
The significance of not having a human driver in a car means that no longer will passengers have another human readily at hand that can help them while undertaking car travel.
This is an aspect that we today take for granted and assume that the driver will be available in some manner to help. Sure, some drivers might be grumpy and hesitant to offer a helping hand, and in fact the surly drivers might refuse outright to assist. Overall, it seems that most drivers would be willing to assist another human that is a passenger, despite the reality that a few drivers might not.
The subtle availability of a helping hand is generally hidden from view and none of us tend to think about the utility of this crucial aspect.
Only when you struggle to get into or out of a car would you suddenly be aware of the need to seek assistance and leverage the driver as a helping hand. Likewise, if you have difficulty putting on a seat-belt, only then might the driver’s helping assistance come to play as they reach over to aid in getting your seat buckled.
Once we have a prevalence of true self-driving cars, I predict that we will all have a revelation that the helping hand has disappeared.
Indeed, in a prior posting, I’ve identified that we might see the emergence of a kind of nanny or concierge role for aiding people that opt to use self-driving cars. When you request a ridesharing car, and if it is a self-driving car, you might indicate that you also want to have a helping hand provided in the vehicle.
The helping hand would be a person that is along for the ride and does so to assist the passenger that will be using the self-driving car.
Keep in mind that the person providing this helping hand does not need to know how to drive and in fact, won’t be driving the car. AI is driving the car. The purpose of the ride-along person is to help any passenger that might need some form of physical assistance of getting into, out of, or needs help during the journey.
Presumably, ridesharing services will charge an extra fee for passengers that request a ride-along assistant. Or, it could become a competitive differentiator among ridesharing services that employ self-driving cars, of which some ridesharing firms might provide a free helping hand as a marketing strategy to get passengers to use their ridesharing driverless cars versus those of other companies.
Let’s add an additional twist to the helping hand topic.
We are already witnessing the gradual replacement of labor by using robots. Assembly lines and manufacturing plants have continued to adapt robots, oftentimes displacing the labor that previously performed the processing in those facilities.
Here’s an intriguing question: Could a robot be used within a driverless car to provide a helping hand to human passengers?
A robot as a helping hand is sometimes referred to as a cobot, a newer term that is an amalgamation of the word collaborative and the word robot. These collaborative robots are purposely designed and built to work hand-in-hand with humans. Since we are all familiar with the word robot, more so than the word cobot, herein the word robot will be used, but consider these robots to be akin to cobots.
Furthermore, the robot is not driving the car.
It is essential to realize that this would be a non-driving robot. The robot is in the driverless car to aid human passengers and has no role in driving the car, other than the tangential aspect that the robot would be electronically communicating with the AI that is driving the car.
Let’s unpack the matter.
The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars
It is important to clarify what I mean when referring to true self-driving cars.
True self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.
These driverless cars are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).
Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, it would be relatively unlikely that a helping hand robot would be used for such cars. Like every day conventional cars, there’s a human driver in the Level 2 and Level 3 car and therefore presumably the human driver would be the helping hand.
It is notable to point out that in spite of those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, do not be misled into believing that you can take away your attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the car, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.
Self-Driving Cars And Helping Hand Robots
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving cars, it might be prudent to consider the adoption of helping hand robots.
First, for those that find it exasperating that a robot might already be targeting to replace human labor in the new role of a driverless car nanny or concierge, a role that hasn’t even appeared as yet, please realize that there is likely to be a choice available.
When requesting a ridesharing driverless car, the passenger could select either a human helping hand to be provided or indicate that a robot helping hand would be suitable.
It is unlikely that the robot helping hand would be as fully capable as a human helping hand. Over time, robot technology will gradually improve, eventually becoming more human-like, but in the near-term, the robots being used would be quite limited in comparison to human assistance.
What might these helping hand robots do?
They could physically help while a human is getting into a car. The robot might be within the car and reach out to aid as a passenger gets into the vehicle. Or, the robot might get out of the car and aid as a human gets into the car, and then the robot would get back into the car.
One drawback of any helping hand assistance, whether a human or a robot, involves the aspect that the helper presumably needs to be ultimately seated inside the self-driving car, meaning that some amount of interior space will be taken up by the helper.
Though it’s true that the helper would consume interior space, the interior of driverless cars will be more open than a conventional car since there is no longer a set of driving controls that normally take up space.
It is also conceivable that a helping hand robot might fit into the trunk of a car, in which case the robot no longer would necessarily consume interior space. The robot might come out of the trunk to perform its helping duties and then get back into the trunk during a driving journey.
Besides helping humans to get into a car, the helping hand robot could aid as a passenger gets out of the car.
And, the helping hand robot could assist during a driving journey.
It certainly would seem eerie to most of us to see a robot that’s seated in a car or that gets out of a car to help a human passenger.
Undoubtedly, a significant cultural change would be needed to accept the notion of such helping hand robots.
In addition, today’s robotic technology would be relatively insufficient for this task. The cost of such robots would likely be prohibitive for use in these helping hand tasks. The fluidity of the movement of the robots would be potentially jarring to humans and off-putting. Etc.
Overall, substantial advances in robotics would be needed to make helping hand robots a practical possibility.
If such robots are developed, the odds are that those specialized kinds of robots would be put to other allied uses.
People might have their own at-home robot that serves as a helping hand around the house. Your helping hand robot might be as familiar to you as the Roomba that you use today to clean your floors. A robot around the house could eventually become commonplace.
In which case, a person that uses a driverless car might take along their own helping hand robot and might not need to have one provided by a ridesharing service.
Conclusion
How safe would a helping hand robot be?
That’s a good question.
One concern about using a helping hand robot would be whether the robot might inadvertently cause harm.
Suppose the robot accidentally shoved a passenger while trying to aid the person or swung around and bopped someone on their head.
Such robots would need to contain a raft of sensors to detect their surroundings and be programmed to work as safely as possible. Fail-safe capabilities would need to be included. If a helping hand robot turned out to be a harming hand, it would be counterproductive and likely sink the possibility of adopting those kinds of robots (rightfully so, until they are ready for prime-time use).
There is already tremendous interest and progress in developing robots that would deliver packages from a vehicle to the front door of a home.
The so-called “last mile” problem of getting a shipped item out of a car or van and then to the recipient is aiming to be solved by walking or rolling robots. The robot would either place the shipped package at the door or might even hand the package to a human that opens the door.
Most of the major shippers and freight hauling companies are pursuing efforts toward developing or adopting these last-mile robots.
In that sense, we might become used to seeing robots that do package deliveries, and it would seem not a huge leap to then accept that such robots could be a driverless car helping hand.
One step leads to the other.
Might we one day have favored helping hand robots, causing you to request robot Jane or robot Jim, ones that you found to be especially helpful to you?
Yes, it’s a real possibility, though do keep in mind that this won’t be happening right away and probably our children or our children’s children will be the generation that gets to use those helping hand robots.
That day should be marked on our future calendars.
