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.
[My thoughts are that it will end up using operators in different areas and the trucks will be handed off to the next operator.]
I’d like to see it pull into a truck stop for fuel and autonomously navigate all the pumps, trucks, cars and clutter laying around without incident.
[The main function of most Truck drivers is less about actually driving than managing, delivering, repositioning, customer communication, blocking and bracing of freight, Counting and verifying volumes, strapping freight, “oh, you need to place the larger skids on the left side of the warehouse next to the 2nd dumpster” etc etc etc etc..........
That’s what trucking is actually mostly about.]
Note on door:
“Hi UPS driver, please leave the package on the west side patio behind the stack of firewood and don’t forget to close the gate behind you.
Thanks, much,
Sandy”
————>..have at it, AI robotics team. It’s what we do all day long.
Good question. I was wondering the same thing. The article didn’t mention this part of the trip. I’m wondering if this is fake news? There is so much of it anywhere.
Tillamook Cheese Factory came out with a new recipe for butter which is creamer than the old one and uses sea salt. The new butter comes in the slender “elgin” cut you are looking for. It’s called elgin cut because the original equipment for forming the butter was made in Elgin Illinois.
The fatter ones we get out west are called western stubbies.
Tillamook will be coming out with another new product but I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a secret.
“, we might get teams of people in Ukraine or India operating the trucks for a fraction of American wages. “
I hope there will be enough band width.
Elevators in sf are often non functioning due to people using them as toilets. At least the BART and MUNI ones.
Elevator operators would be very helpful. But no one ever listens to me
“I remember the days of elevator operators”
I only remember one because the experience stayed in my mind. I was a little kid and the elevator operator was an old guy. His spittoon was full.
I think people involved with AI are exaggerating how close they are to comparison to actual human brains.
Truck’s doing 65 in right lane. A vehicle is directly behind it. Traffic on its left. A vehicle merging in on the right is not yielding.
What’ll it do?
I wonder if they still have elevator operators in the capitol building in Sacramento
even butter is leaving Cal
“You schedule local drivers to handle.......”
You miss my point a bit. The great majority of labor cost in trucking is not about getting loads from Say, Newark to Chicago. It’s about breaking down loads reorganizing, reloading, resecuring, securing lift gates and lift jacks, use of those lift devices, customer-face-to-face verifications, counts,
Sure you could hire local contractors to drive around the city and meet trucks at stop after stop. Why not just put them on the Truck? Why not just put them in the drivers’ seat?
The mistake is that lots of folks think Transportation is just about getting full truckloads from one zip code to another. But that’s only a small part of what happens. And a relatively small portion of the industry’s costs. It’s much more complicated.
I’m retired from 25 years in a major transportation company. Labor costs of the over-the-road, actual driving activity were A vey small % of our costs. “City-delivery” routes are where the labor costs are much higher, and that is the part very very difficult to automate. The universe of variables are huge, often unpredictable, often requiring unique, one-off solutions and don’t yield easily to pre-programmed robots.
[I hope there will be enough band width.]
[Sure you could hire local contractors to drive around the city and meet trucks at stop after stop. Why not just put them on the Truck? Why not just put them in the drivers’ seat?]
“1G, 2G ... 5G, 6G, etc are attempts”
And i am still trying to figure out how to use single side band on my CB radio. I feel run over by technology.
[And i am still trying to figure out how to use single side band on my CB radio. I feel run over by technology.]
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