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.
Goofy.
As long as there is a driver there, who is awake, I’m semi OK with it (no pun intended).
yeah, and when the safety driver isn’t aboard and some thing goes wrong? or the safety driver gets so lax since it’s auto driven and falls asleep, or distracted with phone games or such? people drivers are bad enough, I don’t think auto-driven will be any better.
Thank God! I’ve heard that there’s no butter in Pennsylvania ;-)
the word on the street is that California butter is a carcinogen.
Well I assume someone still had to sit behind the wheel and you need a stretch every now and again.
Question. Who do we give the finger to when these things cut us off in a few years?
I’d like to see it navigate the Montana and Idaho mountain passes in the winter.
But can it drive from Atlanta to Texarkana, pick up 400 cases of Coors beer, and transport it back to Atlanta in 28 hours or less?
Ice Robot Truckers
ROTFLOL!
this truck included a driver the entire time! i would hardly call that a “self-driving” vehicle ...
what they did was exactly what piloted commercial aircraft do every day: running on autopilot most of the time, but manually piloted during crucial periods and when things go wrong or plans change due to weather and other conditions ...
in terms of moment-by-moment decision-making complexity, flying a commercial airliner from point A to point B is massively simpler than simply driving across a large city during morning or evening rush-hour commute, with changing traffic, other-driver behavior, weather,and light conditions, and yet no airline in their right mind is ready to turn all of their commercial flights into pilotless drones ...
The safety driver has to work under DOT log book regulations. He is behind the wheel and is limited to Federal regulation of 11 hours driving in a 14 hr day. After either of the above are met he must take a 10 hour break.
I need this ride. What would it cost me to be the "safety driver"? (One-way).
If there has to be a driver on board, then adopting self-driving trucks is kind of pointless, isn’t it?
[The truck, which traveled on interstates 15 and 70 right before Thanksgiving, had to take scheduled breaks but drove mostly autonomously
Goofy. ]
Truck stop hookers hardest hit.
Who installs the chains?
And who is going to fuel up these driverless trucks?
lol!
That’s what they used to say about elevators.
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