Sideways Elevators

Recall this being discussed for use in the design of large hotels and in aggregated cityscapes.    More than a quantum escalator.  Does it have a real future?  At the link, fascinating pictures of how it works.  See also my posts on modeling elevators.

The Sideways Eleveator of the Future is Here, and It's Wild
by Elizabeth Stinson in Wired.

PEOPLE LAUGHED WHEN ThyssenKrupp, a company synonymous with elevators, announced it was developing one that goes every which way. Who'd ever heard of such a thing? Everyone knows elevators go just two directions: Up and down. Some took to calling it the Wonkavator, after Willy Wonka’s wacky lift that goes sideways, slantways, and longways.

"There were some doubts," company CEO Patrick Bass says with just a bit of understatement. Put aside your doubts. After three years of work, the company is testing the Multi in a German tower and finalizing the safety certification. This crazy contraption zooms up, down, left, right, and diagonally. ThyssenKrupp just sold the first Multi to a residential building under construction in Berlin, and expects to sell them to other developers soon.  ... "

Disrupting Elevators

Recall we worked on simulating operations of elevators, acting as an interactions of people and machines.   Made me note this piece.  In the CACM:

Elevator Makers Think Outside the Box, and Even Sideways  By Reuters 
ThyssenKrupp's new $43 million elevator test tower soars 246 meters (808 ft) above the German town of Rottweil, but the company's lifts chief is not only thinking vertically. .... "

Practical Uses of AR in Maintenance

Practical case of the use of AR, with some similarity to our investigations before the tech had evolved to this point.  Some of the biggest issues, we discovered, were that wearing the devices were cumbersome, say in the hot environment of a plant.   Especially for time consuming service tasks. These operational details are important.  Inclusion of cognitive/AI and digital Assistant capabilities, linked to system data also make much sense.  More detail at the link ..

Going down: Bringing AR to elevator servicing with HoloLens
ThyssenKrupp recently launched its use of Microsoft HoloLens technology in its elevator service operations worldwide. Currently, the global elevator service industry is valued at over $44 billion per year and more than 12 million elevators transport over 1 billion people each day.

The special mixed reality device is set to empower more than 24,000 of the company’s service technicians to do their jobs more safely and efficiently, and keep people and cities moving better than ever before. ... " 

Machine Learning Elevator Models

Some of the earliest modeling work we did was with elevator like conveyance systems ....  Where we used data from real elevator operations.  But the results seem never to have been useful enough.  For some interesting reasons that may be be bridged by the IOT.  In FastCompany: 

How Microsoft and ThyssenKrupp's Elevator tech saves office workers years of waiting.  MAX brings elevators into the Internet of Things with hughway-like traffic control.  Your morning commute might just get faster.  .... 

"Machine learning is the real secret sauce," says Turner. "Predictive analytics let us know exceptions. But we no longer want to report exceptions—we want to prevent them." ... 

IoT hasn't reached elevators partially because they've lasted so long. It would be easier to iterate if elevators wore out quickly, but elevators aren’t smartphones. With 50- or 60-year life spans, ThyssenKrupp decided that their MAX technology must be able to retrofit old elevators instead of requiring companies to buy wholly new elevators. And even if they're upgrading elevators they didn't build, retrofitting elevators is still a booming field: There are 20,000 new elevators installed in the U.S. every year. China, meanwhile, is expecting 500,000 new elevators every year, says Schierenbeck.  ... " 

When Elevators Phone Home

In GigaOM:   This has been described before as the internet of things.  But what are the most interesting that this network can do, beyond the obvious?   Networking intelligent, analytic things will likely be the next revolution.  " .... Your next elevator pitch might actually come from data derived from your elevator. That’s the case for an unnamed elevator manufacturing company that used Splunk’s machine data logging software to track how often its elevators were taking trips in its clients’ buildings. It noticed that the fewer trips people made, the more likely it was that the client would cancel the lucrative maintenance contracts the firm offered.

So it took that data and tweaked its approach. Now when it sees a slowdown it reaches out to the client to try a new plan or just make sure the clients don’t cancel. In the future it may offer new pricing plans to adjust for slack usage. ... " 

Google Innovation Lab

Having worked at an enterprise innovation lab for years, I found this short piece about the Google X labs interesting,    Admittedly we went no where nearly as far, or as technical:  " .... Google reportedly has researchers working on robots, elevators to space, smart light bulbs at the Google X research lab .... ".   Via an article in the NYT.

Advancements in Floor Cleaning Robots

I have been a an observer in a number of enterprise applications of semi-autonomous robotics. In the early 80s we implemented a mail delivery robot to replace a person with a cart during working hours. The robot cart moved over a predefined chemical stripe on the floor, paused at predefined locations and could avoid people and other obstructions. The difficulty was that the robot could not use the elevators and needed to be moved by a person from floor to floor, minimizing cost savings. They were eventually removed.

Now Fuji Heavy Industries and Sumitomo have introduced a floor cleaning robot that can utilize the elevators. The elevators also need to be modified. A step forward. This shows again that robotics are rarely used in enterprise office environments that are already largely standardized. Even after twenty years plus of development. The problem in a home environment, with fewer standards, is even harder, except for the scale of operation.