TRENDS
GRAPHICS BY RANDALL MARTIN
While some of these trucks will involve passive drivers, others will be completely
unmanned, using a combination of autonomous driving technologies and remote piloting
by humans to control the vehicle. “Fully autonomous trucks that are unmanned
and remotely piloted [offer] too many economic benefits … for the trucking industry
to ignore,” Viscelli says.
Chief among these is the precipitous decline in
people willing to drive trucks long-distance: The “ Long-haul driving
American Trucking Association posits an urgent need
is a fun thing to do
for 60,000 drivers. “Long-haul driving is a fun thing to
do in your early 20s, but after that, no one wants to
in your early 20s,
spend their life in a metal box roaming the country,”
says Tawiri. “The turnover of drivers is huge.” but after that, no one
Autonomous trucks would solve the human labor
wants to spend their
dilemma, assuming legislators and regulators are
willing to designate a dedicated lane on highways life in a metal box
to accommodate driverless trucks. Aside from
addressing the driver shortage, the concept would
roaming the country.
increase safety: By limiting the use of autonomous
The turnover of
trucks to a single lane and restricting non-autonomous
vehicles from driving in this lane, the risk of drivers is huge.”
a collision with non-autonomous vehicles is greatly
—Kartik Tawiri, co-founder & CTO,
reduced.
Starsky Robotics
A designated lane also fits well with current
autonomous technology: Driverless trucks can be
remotely controlled through geo-fencing, which involves the use of global positioning
(GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to create a virtual perimeter in a
dedicated lane, limiting automotive autonomy to this geographic boundary.
In this regard, the agriculture industry is instructive. “We’re seeing quite a bit of
autonomous equipment on farms in India, where tractors geo-fenced into a particular
agricultural area drive around freely without anyone on board,” says John
Simlett, consulting firm EY’s Future of Mobility leader.
Another factor encouraging long-haul autonomous trucks is online retail. Expectations
are for the trucks to pick up consumer products purchased online at ports
and rail depots, and transport these goods on dedicated lanes to smaller vans and
trucks that deliver the products.
“We’ll begin to see what the industry calls ‘platooning,’ in which the first truck in a
queue of trucks is driven by a human being, and the remainder use automated driver
support systems, in addition to remote piloting in the first and last miles of travel,
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