A Self-Driving Freight Truck Just Drove Across the Country to Deliver Butter
December 12th, 2019Autonomous freight transportation? Yes, now/soon/regulatory barriers.
Autonomous robotaxis? Don’t hold your breath.
Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars:
My guess is that, if it happens, it will happen in the freight market first. Freight is a walk in the park compared to the robotaxi concept that Musk is talking about.
With freight, you can train the machine on a specific route and annotate, by hand, the areas that it’s not able to navigate properly. The machine wouldn’t be able to self drive without this training and annotation process.
That is far less sexy than what Musk is claiming is right around the corner, but I could see route specific AI systems being good enough to begin firing some truck drivers in the not too distant future.
With regard to this story, here’s an absolutely critical point, which I doubted would be included in the article, “zero disengagements”:
The trip took about 41 hours to complete, according to data from Google Maps, and spans over 2,800 miles. It took the Plus.ai truck three days to complete the journey, during which it made a few stops, but never because it couldn’t handle the driving. In fact, there was a safety driver aboard the vehicle, but they never had to take over and intervene for the truck other than during fuel stops and federally mandated breaks. The company said there were zero “disengagements,” where the truck lost control.
Via: Popular Mechanics:
If you happen to live in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, some 50 miles outside of Philadelphia, your next stick of creamy butter just may have been delivered via self-driving freight truck. It’s believed to be the first time an autonomous freight vehicle has made a cross-country trip, let alone a commercial delivery.
