Posted on 05/26/2014 3:15:22 PM PDT by Kaslin
In August of 2013 I wrote Message to 5.7 Million Truck Drivers "No Drivers Needed" Your Job is About to Vanish.
The key word in that sentence is "about". I did not mean immediately, but I did mean a lot sooner than truck drivers and the general public expect. Most protested. I received many emails saying this would not happen for decades.
Many truck drivers thought it would never happen. Most mentioned insurance issues. Yes, there are problems, but time has marched on even quicker than I thought.
TechCrunch reports California Will Start Granting Licenses For Driverless Cars In September.
Come September, the California Department of Motor Vehicles will begin granting licenses to select driverless cars and their human co-pilots, which will make it a bit less legally iffy as to whether or not they’re actually allowed to be on a public road.
The good news: The license will only cost $150 a pop, and that covers 10 vehicles and up to 20 test drivers.
The bad (but probably actually good) news: You probably can’t get one, so don’t go trying to make your own Googlecar just yet.
Stiff License Terms
Yes, the terms of the license are stiff including $5,000,000 insurance against personal injury, death, or property damage. And a test driver has to be able to take immediate control of the car at all times.
Nonetheless, the licensing is a big step forward. Totally driverless cars are but a single step away. All that needs to happen is for California to eliminate the requirement that someone has to be in the car at all times to take control.
A big issue is that radar can detect size and shape of objects, but it does not have human judgement regarding danger. For example, a balloon blowing across the road is a much different thing from a hunk of metal the same size sitting in the road.
Such difficulties will be overcome.
Incentives and Implications
The implications on the shipping business are staggering. A full-time truck driver might cost as much as $100,000 a year. The incentive to get rid of millions of full-time drivers is massive.
A July 2013 Truckers Report headline reads ATA: Self-Driving Trucks Are “Close To Inevitable”
However, the article itself dismissed the idea totally.
“People come up with these grandiose ideas,” says Bob Esler, a commercial trucker for almost 50 years. “How are you going to get the truck into a dock or fuel it?”
And then there’s loading and unloading. Pre-trip inspections. Signing for drop-offs and pickups. Making sure cargo is properly secured. Making sure the cargo that’s being loaded actually gets loaded. The list just keeps going on and on.
The Last Mile
Many of the objections in the above article have to do with the last mile. Let's assume someone has to load the truck. Let's also assume an actual skilled driver has to dock the truck and make the final delivery (arguably a bad assumption).
Yet, even if those assumptions are true, nothing stops a trucking company from having distribution facilities right off an interstate near major cities, where local drivers deliver the goods the last mile.
Why can't all but the last few miles be driverless even if a skilled driver is needed some step of the way for safety reasons?
Technology marches on at a breathtaking pace. We might actually see commercial driverless vehicles on the roads within a few years.
That’s because we continue to let people override the autopilot.
Going to be a lot less dead hookers...
Today, a doublestack container train can haul 250 full-loaded freight containers with only five locomotives (three in front, one in the middle and one in the rear operated in distributed power control fashion). And improvements in technology could push that to 300 per train.
With the major railroads spending many billions on double-tracking many long distance routes or putting in longer sidings on single-track lines, we are seeing a revolution where more and more freight are moved by container trains, taking more and more truck traffic off the highways. The days of the long-distance trucker may be soon waning.
Aw, flipping the bird and road rage won't be any fun anymore.
Leni
The automated vehicles doing strip mining, or moving goods around in a warehouse, or paving roads....are NOT using LIDAR, or anything close to what Google is using in their automated cars.
Most likely the vehicle in the strip mine uses radio signals to fixed points...those fixed points having a known location. It is very simple, and probably was technically achievable in the 1940’s.
It is virtually impossible to implement such a system of known fixed points on our highways. As a side note, the federal government has mandated a very rudimentary type of fixed point system on our railroads. The railroads already possess a system of radio towers that offer line of sight communication from sea to shining sea, but it is still costing them hundreds of millions of dollars to accomplish even this most basic system.
And accident avoidance systems and automated parking systems are relatively crude. As an example, automated parking presumes that everything else in the world is static - very different than ‘on the road’ conditions. Therefore is uses equipment that is exponentially less expensive than the LIDAR used in Google’s cars.
Do not mistake a fork lift following a wire embedded in the floor, or a paver controlled by GPS, or an automated vehicle in a mine, or a GPS guided tractor on a farm as having anything to do with automated cars and trucks on the wide open road.
I wonder how you would prevent carjackings?
No way I could ever just trust a computer.
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Most of us do all the time. Many cars have a computer between the driver and the engine/brakes/steering. Same with aircraft. Pacemakers, defibrillators, bank accounts, elevators, nuke plants, all run with computers.
I don’t think LIDAR will even be necessary. Parallel parking is a pain in the butt, if they can do that they can drive on the freeway where everybody is going in the same direction. We already have lane tracking. The self driving car is happening right now.
I drive/own a propane transport. Someday it might be automated, but the accidents involving the handling of explosive gases will be spectacular during the transition.
Some tasks require more sensors and handshakes between systems than the human costs in the long run.
Not to mention maneuvering a 53’ trailer which is essentially a bomb into places like orchards or small retail locations.
Line haul of freight? No problem! Bulk hazmat? No way.
I would have a great difficulty backing the trailer to the dock through a complicated grid of obstacles. It would take me several tries, and a few scratches on the vehicle.
However I can program the path for the robot driver in such a way that it can drive in reverse at 10 mph without ever stopping at any of those obstacles. The path of a complex vehicle may be hard for a human to predict; however it is a trivial task for a computer. Not many humans can continuously steer and observe all the volume of the vehicle. Not all humans have eyes on eyestalks to see from the end of the trailer. Not all humans have enough eyes to see both sides of all vehicles (tractor and trailer) at all times. But a robot can do all that, easily.
A well designed robot driver will be safer and more reliable than any human. As other people already pointed out, the computer does not get tired, drunk, or angry. Its errors will be limited to lack of perception - and given that it "sees" with radars, GPS, and in visible and infrared light, with more than two eyes - it will be exceptionally well aware of the surroundings. Fears about robot drivers are like fears of autopilots. But the Shuttle flew to the orbit and back on autopilot - in part because humans are /not capable/ of controlling the vehicle with enough accuracy in space and time.
I hear the problem, though. Yes, truckers - and cab drivers, and many other commercial drivers - will be restricted in employment. They will be doing the last mile, and they will be doing everything else that humans are good at. (Packing and securing of the cargo may be somewhat automated, as it is now with shipping containers.) But even in social sense, there should be no need for a human to sit in a chair for hours, watching the endless hundreds of miles of a freeway.
The problem is caused by the lack of a transition plan from an early, primitive society to an advanced, technological society. We lost hundreds of occupations already - hunters and gatherers are replaced by ranchers and farmers who alone do the work that a whole tribe couldn't do. Now we have access to lots of foods; would we be better off if we could eat only what our wives are able to collect on a given day? As costs of transportation get reduced, the free market will bring the costs of products down as well - trucks are a very expensive mode of transport.
There is yet another interesting aspect. Human-driven trucks cannot be electrically powered because human's time is too expensive. However robot-driven trucks can afford time to charge; this will increase the trip time, but some goods are not sensitive to that, as long as the delivery time is predictable. This will reduce our dependency on oil. (If gas/diesel fuel supplies stop today, half of all Americans will be dead from starvation 2-3 weeks later.)
What should unemployable truckers do? Futurists tell us that they should learn a new occupation. Say, they could become roboticists. We know, of course, that this won't work for most, and it won't be enough anyway. As the society becomes more automated, the mandatory workload on an average human has to decrease, ultimately going to zero when robots do everything. The society, however, does not have a mechanism to do that. Significant changes in methods of production historically resulted in large scale unrest within the society. I am sure Obama is thinking about this problem day and night :-)
The company I work for was recently involved with lowering the tracks in a tunnel, to allow double stacks through.
Also the local intermodal yard (Kansas City) has been replaced by one that is orders of magnitude bigger.
The railroads are enjoying a windfall of money from moving oil around (Why else would Warren Buffet support a president who is blocking the Keystone pipeline), and they are investing a lot of that money in infrastructure that will keep them on top for decades to come.
The same way as it is done today. Plus the video feed from all cameras; plus an emergency signal to the trucking HQ; plus the exact GPS coordinates; plus the LoJack tag on the vehicle(s).
That is about the contents of the trailer. However if you are asking about a single vehicle, be it a car or a truck, or a tractor... they CANNOT be carjacked. You cannot threaten a robot with a gun, you cannot kick the robot out of the vehicle, and you cannot take over. Robot-driven vehicles are IMMUNE to carjacking. The most you can do is to stop them.
I think semis will be the last thing automated because back them up is so tough. Although it could easily wind up that the human driver is just there for final delivery and gets to be a passenger the rest of the time.
“I don’t think LIDAR will even be necessary. Parallel parking is a pain in the butt, if they can do that they can drive on the freeway where everybody is going in the same direction. We already have lane tracking. The self driving car is happening right now.”
What can I say - LIDAR is exactly what Google is using. So I’m fairly sure its very necessary. An enormously expensive. And limited in certain ways.
Your comment about how easy it would be on the freeway with everybody driving the same direction got me thinking. In many cities, such as St. Louis, certain lanes of the freeway switch direction, based on the time of day. What technology would be necessary in a self driving car to be aware of this? We people read flashing signs and colored lights that warn of the change over. Will the DOT be expected to emit another type of signal (without error) to driverless cars? Just one of thousands of everyday scenarios that an automatic car would have to be prepared for.
I don’t think Google’s initiative will amount to much. It’s too little too late. The car companies are putting self driving in one portion of the drive at a time.
Reversible lanes are easy. You’ve already got the GPS so you know where you are, and the map so you know where the reversibles are, and a clock that’s updatable from GPS and therefore accurate. Got cameras too so reading the lights isn’t too tough.
What happens if there is a loss of electricity? How about a computer crash? In the event of a computer failure, can vehicles be programmed to simply drive a straight line and slow down to a stop? What happens if they are on a curvy mountain highway?
Robots better be able to read signs and colored lights - how else would they navigate a typical intersection? Here is an interesting video.
You are obviously not involved in the transportation industry. Margins are TINY in trucking, and few companies are going to be willing to spend the millions required to automate, given the uncertainty of freight arriving intact at the destination. The variables involved are beyond comprehension for a programmer or sensor studio.
Then there is the problem of repair. Refueling. And especially changing and dropping trailers. Desk jockeys think that those trailers stay with the tractor. Wrong.
In my profession, loading and unloading are especially hazardous. Yes, my insurance is expensive. I have my own DOT authority, and am a stand alone trucking company. I deal with Fed and State regulation compliance on a daily basis. For you to sit there and tell me you can program a truck to automate the entire process us both hilarious and sad. Mostly, it shows how little you know about trucking. I can still write compilers if I have to for many systems. Can you drive a semi? I’ll bet not. Until then, you should atay behind your desk in your office and let us deliver EVERYTHING YOU USE IN LIFE.
It probably won’t cost million to implement, at some point any new engine you buy will be able to self drive. And think about how much better your profit margin gets when you no longer have to deal with driver rest laws, now your trucks can run 24 hours only stopping for gas (thus giving your offload supervisor (passenger) something to do).
It’s gonna happen. The question at this point is when not if. Keep your eyes and mind open because there’s a path to greatly improved profitability, especially for the guys ahead of the curve.
“Reversible lanes are easy. You’ve already got the GPS so you know where you are, and the map so you know where the reversibles are, and a clock that’s updatable from GPS and therefore accurate. Got cameras too so reading the lights isn’t too tough.”
Do you remember a story from a few months ago, where some vest bomber killed themselves because they screwed up daylight saving’s time? These things aren’t as easy as you make them out to be. There is a vast difference between technically possible, and reasonably fail safe. You’ve just proposed a system that involves maps, clocks, cameras, and GPS, all working together perfectly...and declared it ‘easy’? Really?
I’m going to classify you as an ‘IT’ guy, and not a ‘car’ guy.
“It’s too little too late. The car companies are putting self driving in one portion of the drive at a time.”
I have to re-iterate how vastly different a self parking feature is, compared to what Google is trying to do. The auto makers are not, and have not introduced ‘self driving’ features into their cars.
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