Autonomous DriftX - a Geeks Delight

The day started the normal way, 5km run before breakfast, shower, suncream and sunning ourselves for the morning, before thoughts of lunch. It was then that the Uber App offered me 20% off if I was to take an autonomous taxi to Driftx - if I happened to be going.

Two things;

• What’s Driftx - we’ll get back to that in a minute

• Uber Autonomous…

I’ve always wanted a ride in an autonomous vehicle - so when I saw them available as an alternative on Uber, I paid a little more to book one. Took ages to arrive, not as efficient as a normal driver, but a great experience. Funny thing is that due to current UAE law a safety officer is permanently in the driver's seat, ready to save the day should anything go wrong with the autonomous system. Needless to say nothing went wrong, and I’m sure we will soon see the removal of the need for the safety officer.

Back to Driftx - I looked it up and it was an autonomous conference on in Abu Dhabi - not far from our hotel, and had just opened that day. I couldn’t really work out whether it was a conference, expo, for industry or public. ChatGPT wasn’t much help either.

Having an interest in this sort of technology it was too good an opportunity to miss, so I signed us both up for attending as 'visitors'. Whilst company and position in company were requested during the registration process (suggesting that it might not be for the public), I wasn’t put off.

So off we popped and after presenting QR codes from our freshly installed conference app we had our lanyards and looked like any other delegate, except we had shorts, flippers, and brightly coloured shirts compared to our mostly suited and booted conference chums.

Highlights when we were there were the many exhibits and demos - which included autonomous cars, trucks and vans - mostly for delivery, police and army, drones of every size and shape, and again for a variety of uses, and lastly robots - of all shapes and sizes. We saw the robots dance - which whilst not very useful demonstrated a whole set of cool and smooth movements. It did look like it would be useful in a fight - displaying some good martial arts skills. Outside, the full size drone that could probably deliver a small car, and the VR headset drone racing were also very cool.

60mins and we were done.

The autonomous taxi ride home was a lot smoother than the uber that brought us - the software didn’t get as lost as many times as the previous driver had.