The trucking industry, and the logistics that keep it running, have become fundamental to the success of supply chains, both nationally and internationally. Without those supply chains running smoothly, allowing for just-in-time orders and millions of successful daily deliveries, industries of all types would grind to a halt. The Brexit situation, with Great Britain withdrawing from the European Union, is a perfect example of the kind of chaos a broken supply chain can create.

Issues such as Brexit may have highlighted how important the trucking industry is, yet geo-political issues such as this are far from the only challenges currently facing freight and haulage, with market demands shifting quickly, and shipments growing accordingly. These issues have put trucking front and center in the eyes of those seeking industry disruption, and seismic changes to the way trucking works. As with so many transformations to the industrial landscape underway, it’s the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, and robotics leading the way and providing truly remarkable solutions to ever-growing problems.

A New Renaissance for the Trucking Industry?

Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and the Internet of Things are proving indispensable to the advancement of the trucking industry in the 21st century. While automated cars have dominated headlines in recent years, most analysts – quite reasonably – believe that it will be freight trucks which will be the first fully-automated vehicles in regular use on the roads. Once an AI-driven long-haul industry is in place, it’s not difficult to imagine the rest of the automotive industry catching up.

Reactions to such projections are mixed. While up to 65% of transport executives hail automation and IoT-driven trucking as nothing short of a renaissance for the industry, there are legitimate concerns that overshadow the excitement. First, there is a real risk of job losses – a common fear whenever AI is mentioned. Furthermore, there are legitimate security concerns regarding the onboard cybernetworks of autonomous trucks being hacked by cybercriminals, something which has been mitigated by innovations in the realm of anonymity networks, which can be adapted to autonomous vehicles.

Let’s take a closer look at five ways on which IoT and AI technology is transforming the trucking industry and consider the benefits to the business of just-in-time trucking and logistics.

1. Self-Driving Trucks are Safer

Perhaps the most convincing of all the arguments in support of the (seemingly unstoppable) rise of automated vehicles, both trucks and private cars, is the fact autonomous vehicles and AI-driven trucks are safer for everyone. Long-distance routes that demand long hours of high-intensity focus and alertness are dangerous for both the truck driver and those they encounter on the road. Reliable and accurate AI systems help reduce the risk of accidents, while alleviating pressures on drivers.

The trucking industry is in the midst of a personnel shortage. It’s a hard job. Fewer people are attracted to it, while the demand for haulage continues to increase. More autonomous trucks wouldn’t merely increase staff safety, they’d also help resolve capacity issues. Currently, autonomous trucks still require human drivers in the cockpit. However, as the robot systems become more skilled on their routes, a future of completely driverless fleets of trucks is easily foreseeable.

2. Staying on Top of Your Fleet

The trucking industry’s key expenses are obvious ones, such as fuel, insurance, and drivers’ wages. By tracking the locations, driving habits, and speed of the trucks in a fleet, expenses can be more successfully and efficiently managed. A combination of Big Data, AI, and IoT devices makes this happen more easily and accurately than ever before and requires little more effort than each driver having an ELD (electronic logging device) as part of their smartphone setup.

3. Fewer Repairs, Better Bottom Lines

IoT technology already plays a key role when it comes to overseeing the performance of factory equipment in the manufacturing industry, highlighting when parts need replacing, and keeping an eye on the smooth running of key components. There’s no reason why the same IoT data and technology shouldn’t be applied to the trucking industry by utilizing sensors that detect issues before they arise or recognize when vehicles need servicing.

This is a particularly attractive notion for trucking business owners and investors. Most trucking companies run up mountainous annual repair bills, as high as $15,000 per vehicle, plus another $4,000 for tires. Many of the issues that arise could have been spotted earlier. Cast in this light, smart trucks would save an immense amount of money while creating safer, more efficient fleets at the same time.

This aspect of AI, called predictive maintenance, allows problems to be addressed before they become severe (and more expensive), generating both peace of mind and a better ROI in the process. It’s no wonder that almost 90% of trucking business owners firmly believe that IoT technology is fundamental to their future success.

4. Keeping Shipments in Good Condition

Sensitive cargo, such as plants and flowers or time-sensitive perishable goods, have long been a source of headaches for the entire industry. IoT technology can automatically adjust variables like temperature and humidity in order to ensure optimal conditions for such cargo. Furthermore, it can help drivers select the best routes, taking into account road conditions, construction zones, and accidents to a timely and well-preserved delivery, both of which are critical for consistently happy customers.

In the home package delivery industry (UPS and FedEx), we’ve already seen how the ability to track packages leads to increased customer satisfaction. AI and IoT advancements allow this same functionality to be applied to commercial trucking. This industry, as much as any, can use all the trust it can find in order to future proof it for decades to come.

5. Greater Efficiency in Loading and Unloading Cargo

Last-mile deliveries and just-in-time services are on the increase, which means that every second makes a difference in logistic success rates. Robots working alongside personnel in warehouses, or working independently and fully-automated, have already made significant improvements in efficiency and time-saving procedures.

Speedier loading and unloading times allow trucks to complete more orders in a day. We’re already seeing the latest robotics technologies implemented in warehouses run by companies such as FedEx, with impressive results. Automation in the warehouse is another way to mitigate issues caused by worker shortages, and another key investment area which could save the industry millions.

IoT in the Trucking Industry: Endless Potential

There’s no questioning the fact that robotics, IoT, and AI have and will continue to cause disruption in the trucking industry, helping business owners save time and money, while staying on top of a rapidly changing and often unpredictable sector. Data-driven and tech-centric developments have been the catalysts for the digital transformation currently underway within trucking. From all indications, it appears as though the industry will act as a bellwether for the future of automated vehicles and logistics in general.

While many of the technological advances predicted for the trucking industry remain in the earliest stages, it’s clear that the business of trucking has responded positively, and is quick to adopt the latest IoT developments. With the potential to become a bonafide high-tech sector, the trucking industry plans to keep breaking new technological ground.

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The Internet of Things, or IoT, is a network of Internet-connected objects capable of collecting and sharing information.

In today’s digital-driven environment, IoT connects nearly everything including homes, offices, and cars, enabling users to remotely operate a myriad of objects and equipments, along with a number of well-known security threats. The benefits of the IoT to a wide range of industries are evident, including the potential to remotely monitor devices in real-time while ensuring safety and predicting disruptions.

However, some technical challenges remain to deploy IoT everywhere, like in underwater environments. And as the Internet of Things expands, it is tempting to think of the different ways how IoT can manifest itself underwater. This is where the Internet of Underwater Things comes in.

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is best described as a global network of smart, interconnected underwater objects that allows the monitoring of vast unexplored bodies of water. Believe it or not, but we currently know more about the surface of the moon than we know about our ocean. Roughly 71% of the planet’s surface is covered by the ocean, a sustained stretch of water that is usually divided into several major and smaller seas. Ocean temperatures determine our climate and wind patterns, and also strongly impact the rest of Earth’s life on land.

We also know that radio waves degrade in seawater over time, and that underwater acoustic communication is easily eavesdropped on and is not stealthy. While IoT has already changed the way we look at our online privacy and developers are making headway into uniform coding to ensure our safety, what can we truly expect when we go underwater?

Let’s find out.

Exciting Developments

We know the future of IoT is bright. With projections stating that up to 25 billion devices will be connected by 2021, it is easy to start wondering how your own industry might be affected. The IoUT, however, has only started to make waves very recently. Many scientists believe that light could be the key to making the underwater Internet of Things happen.

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, are suggesting the use of underwater optical communications by investigating the Simultaneous Lightwave Information and Power Transfer (SLIPT) configurations to transmit energy and data to underwater electronic devices.

The SLIPT system is believed to be an extremely viable option. For example, in the case of human underwater equipment inspections, SLIPT will be less prone to error than hand signals and less prone to audible confusion than ultrasound voice-based communicators. Remarkably, to date, hand signals are still a common form of communication between divers.

Researchers believe that SLIPT can help to charge devices in inaccessible areas where constant recharging is difficult and expensive or not possible, and envisages ships or boats on the surface beaming optical communications to underwater vehicles or IoT sensors on the seafloor. The lasers will connect and power underwater robots and devices simultaneously. Return data will be transmitted to the surface vessel, which then communicates via RF (radio) to land bases or data centers.

Surface buoys or drones could also be employed to inject power down to the ocean floor and, at the same time, end up receiving data. While there is still a lot of development that needs to be done before SLIPT is operational, researchers are seeing its potential.

In the United States, Sigfox U.S.A. has revealed that Gloucester Innovation has chosen its Internet of Things network to record seafloor data with simple devices that could potentially be attached to more than 300,000 Massachusetts lobster traps. Through the initiative, dubbed “LobsterNet,” Sigfox U.S.A. will supply low-power wide-area connectivity, enabling the devices to transmit oceanic acidity, depth, temperature, and other information on the ocean floor on a daily basis. Initially, Gloucester Innovation would use the data to enable fishermen to position and track lobster traps more efficiently, and ultimately aid the Blue Economy.

The Science and Technology Organization of NATO (NATO STO) is deploying an IoT solution using SPOT Trace to further their understanding of oceans around the world. Research teams from the NATO STO Maritime Research and Experimentation Center (CMRE), based in La Spezia, Italy, are integrating low-cost SPOT Trace devices into freely floating boys and allowing them to float in the Mediterranean as well as Arctic waters to track surface drift behavior. SPOT Trace tracks these ‘drifters’ movements and transmits their location data over the Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network of Globalstar.

KAUST, located on the Red Sea coast, has been involved in another area of technical exploration for several years, including in creating some early, groundbreaking underwater data communications. In 2015, it ran a 16-QAM-OFDM transmission with a 450-nanometer laser, 4.8 gigabit per second. OFDM, or Multiplexing in the Orthogonal Frequency Division, separates single data streams into multiple channels to reduce interference.

Interestingly, for data centers, seas and oceans are becoming ever more significant. Significant portions of the world’s population are located on or near coasts, rather than inland, and we are experiencing a shift to edge-style computing that places resources closer to data sources. There is also a growing need for compute cooling, something that ocean water can provide. As a method of powering servers, even wave energy means that ocean and data are becoming entwined.

After building an undersea water-cooling data center a hundred and seventeen feet below the ocean’s surface in 2018, even Microsoft jumped into the mix. Additionally, while many believe that our communications are being carried via satellite, almost all of our intercontinental communications are actually taking place underwater, via undersea fiber-optic cables. These garden-hose-sized cables hold almost all national, public Internet traffic.

But, these developments are not part of a brand-new synergy. Aside from the eco-monitoring computer drivers, one of the most persuasive and significant reasons ocean-based computing is being extensively explored is that on the high seas, there is no rent payable and no jurisdictional ownership.
The Impact of Climate Change

Our internet connectivity and online safety is threatened by a variety of nefarious actors on a daily basis and have led to the use of a multitude of barriers from our side. One of these, and it’s one we also unfortunately can’t do very much about, is climate change.

A recent study has overlaid sea level incursion forecasts on top of U.S. vital internet infrastructure maps to reveal that climate change by 2033 would immerse around 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) of fiber cables: wires that were placed decades ago and never intended for underwater operations.

Obviously, the vast majority of internet cables that carry your everyday data fix are currently underwater, snaking the ocean floor across a massive global network that spans about 550,000 miles (885,000 km) of submarine bandwidth and are capable of upload speeds up to 2,000 Mbps, or megabits per second, at the most. The fact remains that undersea cables were specifically designed to be waterproof. However, when these submarine cables reach coastal towns, the actual cabling usually changes from waterproof wires to ones that are merely water-resistant.

Organizations began their own network infrastructure deployments at the time the commercialization of the internet got underway. Everyone adhered to their own policies and strategies and deployed based on the current needs of the time. Unfortunately despite the fact that this process happened ages ago, before today’s degree of global warming awareness, the future-proofing of the networks against an unforeseen flooding event never formed part of the planning.

Miami, Seattle, and New York are the most vulnerable cities in the U.S., but considering how the internet operates, the consequences would not be concentrated in those areas alone as all data links ferried through impacted regions may be affected. Combine this with the fact that researchers only observed American infrastructure, and the same issue may be a challenge in countries around the world, it’s obvious that we’re facing a big problem.

Some of the connectivity giants like AT&T and Verizon are already aware of the issue and are installing systems that can withstand the rising tide. But the fact remains that much of the internet technology installed didn’t need to consider the consequences of climate change, and it is of the utmost importance that all future deployments should recognize and consider the effects of it.

Conclusion

However, the future of the Internet of Underwater Things isn’t just doom and gloom. It is glaringly bright and the SUNRISE project shows this. This EU-funded project has already built and tested underwater robot prototypes. These robots imitate communicating marine animals. They use acoustic signals with reduced intensity, and wave frequencies that do not disturb the animals.

The SUNRISE team has already demonstrated that underwater drones are able to transmit data in real-time, as well as communicate and acknowledge simple instructions. Such drones interact with each other using a language known as “Janus” in Esperanto. The prototype drones that were granted a Mediterranean Sea test run have already assisted in finding a missing cargo container in Porto, Portugal.

Even though it’s still in its teen years, IoUT is showing a lot of potential. It is currently in the “R&D process,” and is sponsored by state-funded organizations. It won’t be too long before the connectivity and communication between the “things” become secure and the software fully developed.

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