Electronics giant Panasonic announced today that it has started testing autonomous delivery robots on public roads in the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town in Japan. Initial tests started in November; the company aims to begin home delivery tests in February of 2021.

Panasonic said the this first phase will include the home delivery of “packages and products using a smartphone app.” While food wasn’t specifically mentioned in the press release, the company pointed out the growth of food delivery and lack of labor to carry out those deliveries. Additionally, Panasonic talked about the growing need for contactless delivery options, thanks to the pandemic.

Panasonic got permission from Fujisawa City authorities to begin its self-driving tests. The autonomous robots will be connected via a public network, and a human operator will monitor the robots from a control center and take over driving should the need arise.

Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is an urban development project located on the former site of Panasonic’s factory in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, with the participation of 18 groups including Panasonic and Fujisawa City. As a real smart town where more than 2,000 people live, it is working on sustainable urban development while also aiming to solve issues facing society and the community through the implementation of mechanisms jointly designed by the companies, local governments, and residents involved with the town, and through the creation of new services.

Panasonic’s delivery robot move is part of a broader trend, as we see cities from around the world begin rolling out delivery robots on public streets. In Russia, Yandex robots are making restaurant deliveries in Moscow. The Postmates Serve robot is making deliveries from the Pink Dot market in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. And Woowa Brothers delivery robots have started making food deliveries in Seoul, South Korea.

We’ve seen an increase in robot activity since the pandemic forced restaurants, grocery and delivery services to establish contactless delivery options. Robots can remove at least one form of human-to-human interaction when getting your food. But robots have other advantages as well, such as the ability to work around the clock and potentially bring down the cost of delivery, making it more affordable to more people.

But as Panasonic’s announcement shows, there are still legal and technical hurdles that need to be overcome. Even in the smart town it helped form, Panasonic still needs to get permits and run tests before it can dive right in to dropping by someone’s front door.

More than half of the world’s population has been lured by the pull of cities – the attraction of increased prosperity, employment, opportunity, education and entertainment has been too good to turn down. City planners and entrepreneurs have helped fuel this by building essential services and businesses for citizens, leading to the rapid expansion of urban areas.

This in turn has resulted in the likes of sustainable development goals, upgraded zoning, smart density and smart technology being used to accommodate the changing demands of the citizen. But the onset of a ’black swan’ pandemic crisis has exposed the quality of governance, scale of inequalities and the ability for cities to adapt to unexpected events overnight.

What has been exposed by the Covid-19 crisis is that the historic independent silo development of many city departments – be it public safety, health care, e-government, communications, transportation, power and water, municipal services, environmental and logistics – have not been able to collaborate and adapt fast enough to protect their citizens. The digital transformation of city services is required, where information and situational awareness is readily available from all required sources in near real-time to make informed decisions.

Many city departments have not been able to collaborate and adapt fast enough to protect their citizens

The digital transformation of a smart city today would follow the concept of ’Device – Pipe – Cloud – Application’. Devices collect data; the pipe delivers the data over the transportation infrastructure to the cloud where it is stored, classified and cross-correlated and made available for processing by applications for visualisation to make informed decisions. This is a simplified model, but can be applied to any vertical in a smart city, the key being a collaborated cloud-based digital platform which has access to all the data in a ’data lake’ based on classification for adaptive processing and decision making.

This model helps cities make more effective decisions for better city management.

One of the cities where Huawei has adopted these principles to develop a smart city solution is the Royal Commission of Yanbu in Saudi Arabia. A multi-phase approach was adopted, starting with the infrastructure connecting devices from various sub-systems including traffic, surveillance, smart lighting, help points, parking and environmental monitoring, to mention a few. Further phases have concentrated on the digital platform to provide an effective collaborative municipal administration, high-quality public services and generate sustainable economic development. The Yanbu Smart City Project won the prestigious ’Data and Technology Award’ at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2017 in Barcelona.

Cities have many existing systems per department that cater for their respective services, and these can be migrated in a phased approach to the cloud. The first phase would be upgrading the infrastructure to enable device connectivity and the exchange of information between the government entities. A second phase would be to create a shared digital platform in the form of a hybrid cloud that caters for private and public needs. The benefits of a cloud environment are plentiful, including sharing of information, sharing resources, load balancing, higher availability, cloud computing, single monitoring and maintenance operations, elastic scalability and reduced total cost of operations.

Furthermore, one of the most powerful additions is the ability to improve the quality and productivity of paperless services by introducing automation of processes, and specifically automated services enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI). By adding AI to the ‘Device-Pipe-Cloud-Application’ model at every level, we enable intelligent interaction of devices, intelligent redundant and self healing connectivity, feeding data to an intelligent cloud hub for data processing providing an intelligent twin for a new chapter of smart city evolution.

Cities’ existing systems can be migrated in a phased approach to the cloud

One of the services that Huawei provides on Huawei Cloud Services (HCS) is adapting artificial intelligence capabilities to a customer’s specific requirements, by training the need on the online cloud and then inferencing the adapted algorithm on edge-based neural computing technology. We refer to this as Enterprise Intelligence (EI). There are dozens of pre-trained humanlike engagement application protocol interface (API) algorithms that can be combined to create and train the customer’s specific intelligence routines required in a smart city and for any vertical industry. Some of these APIs include image recognition, optical character recognition, natural language processing, speech to text and vice versa, image search, and video content review. Once trained on customer-provided data, these algorithms are applied for their intended use on site at the required level of the intelligent twin smart city.

Other examples of how it can be used include automated visual garbage sorting using robots, visual inspection of power transmission lines using drones equipped with cameras, autonomous robots that patrol the city for public safety and municipality visual inspection data collection. All EI implementations are aimed at improving productivity, efficiency, quality and safety of services and should always include an ethical checking process for bias, liability and inequality.

Data’s richness

The key to a transformational smart city is to make use of the massive amounts of data available to help the AI-assisted digital platform make informed decisions. By successfully tapping into this data, a city can provide situational awareness, automate and optimise the productivity of repetitive processes, enable forecasting and prediction models, and simulate intelligent digital twin environments for optimal management. The user interface to visualise all this information is the Intelligent Operation Centre (IOC) application using a 3D geographical information system and augmented reality to provide an interactive dashboard of all activity and statistics.

Other than applying the simplified principle of Device-Pipe-Cloud-Application mentioned earlier, the critical technical components of the smart city of the future are simple: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Cloud (ABC) combined with 5G as the transportation medium. Together these provide the digital transformation requirements of the future. This enables a smart city to become a perfect testbed for innovations based on a digital cloud-based platform that is agile and adaptable to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – the so-called VUCA principles that might become the new norm. Priorities include following sustainability development guidelines, prioritising circular economics, climate change resilience, and intolerance of inequality.