Rise of the Machines

 HOME             UNIT 1           UNIT 2          UNIT 3         UNIT 4           UNIT 5

Rise of the Machines

Over the past decades, billions of people have hooked themselves up to the Internet via the computer, and more recently mobile devices such as smartphones. This communication revolution is now extending to objects as well as people. Machine-to-machine(M2M) communication has long been predicted, and now it is rushing into the present. According to Parks Associates, the number of smartphones (excluding feature phones) worldwide is expected to top 1.1 billion in 2013.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Smart grid devices will reach 244 million; e-readers and tablets will be 487 million; networked office devices, 2.37 billion; networked medical devices, 86 million; connected automobiles, 45 million; connected appliances, 547 million; connected military devices, 105 million; information technology (IT) system devices, 431 million; connected supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)/industry automation devices, 45 million; and other connected consumer electronic devices minus smartphones, e-readers, and tablets will reach a whopping 5+ billion and counting.

     “Rise of the machines” became a popular catchphrase after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a 2003 science-fiction action film directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie demonstrates the power of machines or robots that could potentially overpower human beings.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, big U.S. defense budgets financed the deployment of thousands of service robots, including unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, to Iraq and Afghanistan. IEEE Spectrum a million industrial robots toiling around the world in 2008, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. In 2011, the world’s industrial robot population was estimated to be 1.2 million. Also, according to the Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robotics, the service robot market is expected to double in size by 2013 from 2011.

A robot is a kind of tightly coupled cyber-physical system (CPS). A CPS (Figure 1.1) is an embedded sensor network and control system featuring a tight combination of, and coordination between, the system’s computational and physical elements. Cyber-physical systems or robots can be found in areas as diverse as aerospace, automotive industry, chemical processes, civil infrastructure, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation systems, entertainment, and consumer appliances.

 A real-world example of such a system is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) CarTel project where a fleet of taxis collects real-time traffic information in the Boston area. Together with historical data, this information is then used for calculating the fastest route for a given time of the day.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has identified cyber-physical systems as a key area of research, proposed by Helen Gill at the High Confidence Software and Systems conference in 2008. In 2007, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology listed CPS as one of the top eight key technologies of the future, and a $4 billion budget was allocated for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development project. The expectation is that in the coming years, ongoing advances in science and engineering will improve the link between computational and physical elements, dramatically increasing the adaptability, autonomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability, safety, and usability of cyber-physical systems.

The power of machines has experienced rapid development, first through the steam-engine technology based industrial revolution and then the second electrical, oil-powered internal combustion engine industrial revolution. Along with the rise of the power of machines comes the exponential rise of the number of machines during the ongoing third industrial revolution of the Internet-based information age. The past three decades have seen extraordinary growth in the number and choice of electrical and electronic machines or devices (Figure 1.2).

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), together with cloud computing, is, after the modern computer (1946) and the Internet (1972), the world’s third wave of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

Gordon Bell’s law says that “roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and the establishment of a new industry”. Bell predicted that home and personal area networks will form starting from 2010.

Also, in 2002, Sun’s chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos indicated that the first Internet wave consisted of an “Internet of computers” and the second wave, which we are currently in, is an “Internet of Things that embed computers.” The third Internet wave, which is an “Internet of Things,” consists of physical objects like thermostats, switches, packages, and clothes.

So far, our view of the Internet has been human-centric. It is quite likely that sooner or later the majority of items connected to the Internet will not be humans, but things. The IoT will primarily expand communication from the 7 billion people around the world to the estimated 50 to 70 billion machines. This means significant opportunities for the telecom industry to develop new IoT “subscribers” that substantially surpass the number of current subscribers based on population. This advancement signifies a massive shift in human development, from an electronic society to a ubiquitous society in Embedded Devices (20 billion), Static Devices (5 billion), Mobile Information Devices (1.4 billion) ,Mobile Devices (.25 billion) Static Information Devices (1 billion)

which everything is connected (for example, the sensor in Nike+shoes sends information to an iPod application) and everything can be accessed anywhere. Supported by IPv6 and eventually the Future Internet Architecture, the IoT would have the potential of connecting the 100 trillion things that are deemed to exist on Earth.

Recent developments predict that we will have 16 billion connected devices by the year 2020, which will average out to six devices per person on earth. Devices like smartphones and M2M or thing-to-thing communication will be the main drivers for further development. By 2015, wirelessly networked sensors in everything we own will form a new web. But it will only be of value if the terabyte torrent of data it generates can be collected, analyzed, and interpreted [6]. The first direct consequence is the generation of huge quantities of data from physical or virtual objects that are connected. As a result, consumer-device-related messaging volume could easily reach between 1,000 and 10,000 per person per day.

As a key aspect of the next-generation Internet, the Internet of Things is expected to have a dramatic impact on almost all sectors of the web-based service economy. It will enable tremendous efficiency gains, especially in the transportation, retail, manufacturing, logistics, and energy sectors. Forrester Research also predicts that the number of objects connected to the IoT will be 30 times the number of people connected to the Internet by 2020. IoT is a trillion-dollar industry.