The first project of sending an autonomous truck with full payload across the country – all the way from Tulare in California to Quakertown in Pennsylvania – has been completed successfully.
The project was backed by a Silicon Valley startup. The truck traveled a total of 2,800 miles across the US and was carrying 40,000 lbs. of Land O’Lakes butter.
The project was commissioned by Plus.ai, from Cupertino, who also equipped the vehicle with a backup driver.
The driver was tasked with taking control of the truck in case anything went wrong. A safety engineer was also there to monitor the project.
The co-founder and COO of Plus.ai, Shawn Kerrigan, said in his statement about the project: “We wanted to demonstrate the safety, reliability and maturity of our overall system.”
Shawn said the truck was equipped with high-tech, cutting edge radar and lidar technology as well as cameras to help it maintain a safe distance from other vehicles or obstructions on the road, reported the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The truck was programmed to have mid-way breaks on the way, even though the driving was done autonomously.
Shawn also made it clear that the self-driving function of the truck operated seamlessly throughout the route and there were zero instances of the system becoming hanged.
According to Shawn, Plus.ai has been operating freight trucks across the US for roughly a year now.
Chief supply officer at Land O’Lakes, Yone Dewberry, who was quite excited about the project, said: “To be able to address this peak demand with a fuel-and-cost-effective freight transport solution will be tremendously valuable to our business.”
Science magazine Popular Mechanics said of the project: “The founders, a group of Stanford Ph.D. students, knew that trucking—which has been experiencing a labor shortage since 2003, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—is the primary method for shipping goods across the U.
S. So they decided to apply their artificial intelligence know-how to long-haul trucking, building out the full-stack self-driving technology needed to make a cross country freight trip possible.”
The Sentinel added: “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… The timeline will depend on regulations, which vary state to state, he said.”
Another similar experiment was done last year when a self-driving truck traveled 2,400 miles across America but in that experiment, the truck was empty.
California Department of Motor Vehicles told Popular Mechanics that so far 65 companies have a license for testing autonomous vehicles.
According to the American management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, “Sixty-five percent of the nation’s consumable goods are trucked to market. With full autonomy, operating costs would decline by about 45 percent, saving the US for-hire trucking industry between $85 billion and $125 billion.”
Replaced!