With a little help.
Posted on 12/11/2019 3:44:21 PM PST by Drango
A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck, which finished a 2,800-mile-run from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania for Land O’Lakes in under three days. The trip was smooth like butter, 40,000 pounds of it.
Plus.ai, a 3-year-old company in Cupertino, announced the milestone Tuesday. A safety driver was aboard the autonomous semi, ready to take the wheel if needed, along with a safety engineer who observed how things were going.
“We wanted to demonstrate the safety, reliability and maturity of our overall system,” said Shawn Kerrigan, co-founder and chief operating officer of the company, in an interview Monday. The company’s system uses cameras, radar and lidar — laser-based technology to help vehicles determine distance — and handled the different terrains and weather conditions such as rain and low visibility well, he said.
The truck, which traveled on interstates 15 and 70 right before Thanksgiving, had to take scheduled breaks but drove mostly autonomously. There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said.
Plus.ai has been running freight every week for about a year, its COO said, but this is the first cross-country trip and partnership it has talked about publicly.
End of year is peak butter time, according to Land O’Lakes.
“To be able to address this peak demand with a fuel- and cost-effective freight transport solution will be tremendously valuable to our business,” said Yone Dewberry, the butter maker’s chief supply officer, in a statement.
How long will it be before self-driving trucks are delivering goods regularly across the nation’s highways? Kerrigan thinks it’s “a few years out.”
Dan Ives, managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities, predicts there will be quite a few autonomous freight-delivery pilots in 2020 and 2021, with the beginning of a commercial rollout in 2022. Like other experts, he believes the trucking industry will be the first to adopt autonomous technology on a mass scale.
The timeline will depend on regulations, which vary state to state, he said.
About 10 to 15 companies nationwide are working on autonomous freight delivery, Ives said. That includes San Francisco-based self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks, which last year completed a five-day, 2,400-mile cross-country trip. But that truck carried no freight.
With a little help.
Good luck in the snow!
LOL!!!
“ALL salt is SEA salt!”
Not by todays standards. Sea salt has micro-plastics in it today.
OK, January Tillamook is coming out with 4 flavors of cream cheese.
Plain, cheddar, strawberry and vegetable
Well, I won’t be trying fruit flavored cream cheese any time soon, but I will look for Elgin sized butter. Thanks for the heads up.
Do elevators have to deal with traffic and unpredictable conditions?
I don’t think self-driving vehicles are in the future. There is too much complexity, too much need for a human to act in rapidly evolving situations.
The human backup because of dot rules, imagine one driver for 4 trucks one day, basically drivers switching over to run a train of trucks
That will be great. That would be the END of the Teamster’s Union. Overpaid truck drivers could be replaced by cheap remote-control jockeys anywhere in the world. If I owned a trucking company, I’d put the control centers in Vietnam or Cambodia. Those workers are smart and work cheap.
And when they do away with drivers completely what happens if the truck breaks down?
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Make an automated call to a self driving wrecker?
lol
Now if we can get the truck to deliver the Democrats in the house to the shit plant!
I’ve always found trucking industry interesting, maybe because I worked at a truck stop for a couple of years while in college. This was about forty years ago. So, things have probably changed since then. But, back in the day, truckers when passing through certain states, were required to purchase a certain amount of fuel so to pay road use tax for wear and tear on the road. Anyway, this meant additional stops for fuel, weigh station stops for verification, etc. For autonomous trucking it means additional risk.
40,000 pounds of butter - reminds me of an old Harry Chapin song....
If they are ALL driveless; there would be NO humans at the wheel making mistakes in judgement.
Every year, human professional truck drivers PREVENT accidents that would be caused by Robot Trucking (self driving) gadgets.
Just saying ...
Silicon is a poor replacement for Carbon.
Self driving trucks are 300 years away.
My neighbor was a trucker. Went through all the training and ended up complaining when he got a somewhat self driving truck because it was like he went through that training for nothing. He ended up getting killed in a wreck. His rig slammed into another, an empty flat bed, so bad that it pushed the flat bed through it’s cab and the bed went most of the way through another rig’s box type trailer and knocked the cab of the front truck. Three rigs with the middle being a flat bed and the front truck’s cab getting knocked of by that flat bed. My neighbor never slowed down from that 65-70 mph he was going. Guy in the front truck lived.
I saw news video and pics of the crash and noticed my neighbor’s rig had red painted wheels but the self driver he used to bring home had brand new, shiny Alcoa aluminum wheels. My theory is that he got used to not having to pay much attention and then they stuck him in a non-self driving truck. It happened in the mid-afternoon but I suppose he could have fallen asleep. He did love using his big smart phone too so who knows.
If we’re going to go the self driving vehicle route, especially with big rigs, I want them to have their own lanes with a big barrier between them and regular drivers. Imagine if it was nothing but passenger vehicles or a school bus in front of my neighbor. Add to that, if the rig had no driver.
Maximum Overdrive
I hear you.
I grew up in Rochester, New York in the 50’s. We had two big department stores named Sibley’s and McCurdy’s. They both had elevator operators. I mostly remember the Sibley’s elevators because they were pretty fancy. I can’t remember if any of the operators wore uniforms, but I do remember you had to call out what floor you wanted. I also remember the elevators had an inner gate that had to be locked into place before the outer doors would close. And I remember the times when the operator hadn’t quite reached the floor they needed, and had to adjust the car up or down so it was level with the floor. And some elevators had pull-down seats for the operator to sit on while he/she was working.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.