Trucking is a big business. In the US, trucking industry revenues are in excess of $726bn. No wonder then that autonomous trucking is a hot topic.

The world's first conference on energy independent electric vehicles took place at the Technical University of Delft 27-28 September. It was well timed because many major new versions are about to hit the market addressing major global challenges.

New robotics is already quietly transforming many aspects of agriculture, and the agrochemicals business is no exception. Here, intelligent and autonomous robots can enable ultraprecision agriculture, potentially changing the nature of the agrochemicals business.

New Zealand leads the world in zero emission renewable grid electricity now at 85%. With a nice balance between geothermal, hydroelectric, unusually continuous wind power and some solar, the country has less intermittency of green power than most.

As the world's first conference on Energy Independent Electric Vehicles approaches on September 27-28 in the Technical University of Delft Netherlands, key players, all of whom are speaking at the event, have been announcing some remarkable new developments.

Analyst IDTechEx has long appraised the auto industry as consisting of those leading the move to pure electric powertrains such as Tesla, Renault + Nissan, Yutong and BYD of China, those only recently giving it major emphasis such as Toyota, Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen (under duress) and Daimler and those almost in denial such as Fiat Chrysler, Mazda and Suzuki, their pure electric activity being more of a gesture than a serious activity.

While grid load from electric vehicles is expected to rise in the near future. Engineers are already looking for solutions to make electric vehicles function independently of the grid.

Robotic technology will transform the forklift industry, causing a colossal transfer of value from human-provided driving services, towards spending on autonomous industrial material handling machines, thus fuelling an industry revenue boom far exceeding recent growth trends.

Once we had rows of ugly stalks along the roadside that took your coins for parking - or more often failed to take your coins for parking. Unloved, they have now largely gone and no one mourns their passing. Unfortunately, in

Battery elimination, indeed elimination of all energy storage, is moving to even higher power, from electronics to electrical engineering

Last mile delivery remains an expensive affair in the parcel delivery business, often representing more than half of the total cost. Its importance is also growing thanks to a change in the composition of total deliveries with B2C deliveries rapidly taking on a bigger share.

Robots are becoming uncaged, mobile, collaborative and increasingly intelligent and dexterous, moving beyond their traditional strongholds to bring automation to previously inaccessible tasks.

After several years of excitement, investment and growing interest in thermoelectrics and their potential in energy harvesting applications, it's now time to clearly look at what's hype and what's reality, and the technology developers in the field know that well.

Off-grid power has been in decline. Widely seeing it as the poor man's option, users have aspired to get beyond it to the more secure, "troublefree" world of on-grid - or so they believed.

Evovelo has just announced its prototype electric trike, which can reach speeds of 45 kph with a drivers' cab and solar panel on the roof.

Electric vehicles are the future and ones that make their own electricity are the end game for these.

All the publicity currently goes to the race to make regular and premium cars have longer range

There is more energy to harvest at sea. True, water craft have stronger resistance to overcome but on balance, it means that energy independent electric boats are more common than their equivalents on land or in the air and they have lessons for both.

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Companies get vaporised when market segmentation widens. Classics are those making steam trains missing the move to electric and to other modes of travel and NortonVilliersTriumph thinking that dominance of the UK motorcycle market protected them when, of course, motorcycles are a world market appropriately addressed by others