Autonomous vehicles changing the face of science

It’s the age of autonomous vehicles—from trains to buses, cars, drones and even battlefield tanks—engineers across the world are building vehicles that drive themselves without humans at the wheels. Powered by artificial sensors that ‘see’, ‘feel’ and ‘hear’, and an artificial ‘brain’ that can learn, technology companies are rapidly doling out newer versions of autonomous vehicles to solve some of the toughest challenges. Now, science and scientists are having their moment with autonomous vehicles—reaping the benefits of science for science.

For decades, space engineers have toyed around with expensive rovers that trail on the surface of faraway satellites and planets, giving us an intimate view of our extraterrestrial neighbours. In recent years, NASA’s Perseverance has revealed the intricate details of the Red Planet’s surface, while CNSA’s Yutu-2 has crawled the moon to explore lunar rocks.

Back on earth, as sensors become cheaper and electronics become smarter, building similar automated vehicles that can be remotely controlled is gaining pace. Many are being built to reach nooks and corners of the planet that humans have never been to, or are unsafe for us, and are helping scientists break new frontiers.

For example, deep in the high seas, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are surveying the sea floor—looking for new lifeforms, unearthing sunken ships and submarines, crawling seamounts and volcanoes and even digging up valuable minerals. Unmanned vehicles are being put in protected areas to study animal behaviour and protect wildlife without direct human intervention. Dog-like robots, walking on four legs, are trained to follow their ‘owners’ and sniff hazardous substances with their electronic noses. Drones are studying frigid glaciers and ice sheets in the poles, warning us about the warming world. Autonomous vehicles are also doubling up as mosquito slayers—in Taiwan, they are slithering under city sewers hunting down breeding colonies of Aedes mosquitoes that cause dengue fever, chikungunya and Zika.

A few decades ago, this might have all looked straight out of a science fiction novel but today automated vehicles are changing the face of science in ways never seen before.

- Spoorthy Raman