The race has long been underway for automated vehicle capability to enable long-haul driverless trucking. Going for the prize are significant established players (Aurora, Kodiak Robotics, Plus, Torc Robotics), several new ones (Stack AV, Waabi), while some have exited the space (Embark, Locomation, TuSimple, Waymo).
The focus has been on highway-only operations (ramp-to-ramp) which require a “transfer yard” near a freeway exit. At the transfer yard, the trailer is disconnected from the AV tractor and reconnected to a human-driven truck, which takes the load to its final destination somewhere in the hinterlands. The first fully commercial operations using this approach are expected to go live next year.
But, do shippers really want to add this new operational complexity? Of course not. However, given the vastly lowered cost of operations, along with safety and fuel economy benefits that come with AVs, they’ll do it.
Thus, an opportunity for competitive advantage! If you’re an AV truck developer, being able to take the load from the highway ramp to the final destination will attract new customers and allow you to charge more favorable rates. At the same time, you’re also entering a new arena of driving complexity, which may entail the need for new sensors, more computational power, and a staffing up a software development program.
On the highway, automated vehicles must be able to perceive and handle any type of road hazard, even the very unusual occurrence of pedestrians and bicyclists. I imagine that the typical response to such a situation will be to slow down or stop on the shoulder and await further commands from Remote Assistance team. This is not operationally efficient but can likely be tolerated by the customer because it is an uncommon event.
Pedestrians and bicyclists and scooters are legitimate road users on streets. An automated tractor trailer must appropriately share the road with these users. For example, perception to the front and sides of the combination vehicle is vital when making a right turn into a distribution center while a bicyclist is rolling past and has the right of way.
And of course, traffic lights and stop signs must be seen and obeyed.
Simply put, while the AV truck sensor suite designed for highway provides most of the needed capability for street operations, significant software upgrades are needed for street driving.
Back in the day, TuSimple provided several videos of their trucks running from loading-dock-to-ramp and then entering the highway. Waymo Via implied they had similar capability. TuSimple has now exited the U.S. market and Waymo has put Waymo Via on ice.
What about the other truck AV developers? For the business advantages street operations offer, most of the AV truck developers have had street operations on their roadmap from the beginning. But they’ve viewed this as a second- or third-generation capability. Now development is accelerating and these guys are starting to strut their stuff.
Who’s on the street? Recently demo’s and video’s have shown that at least three long haul AV trucking developers are addressing the possibility of taking loads off-highway to a final destination.
Kodiak
Kodiak posted this video of street driving recently. It shows their truck exiting the highway via the off-ramp, stopping at a traffic signal, and then making a left turn onto an arterial street which has two lanes each way. Multiple traffic signals are handled and the truck eventually turns into a distribution center. Another segment shows the vehicle entering a right turn lane onto another arterial, waiting for an appropriate gap before entering the road.
Starting at their truckport in Villa Rica, Georgia, another Kodiak video shows their vehicle successfully performing an unprotected left turn to enter a two-lane-each-way arterial. After traveling about a mile, the truck stops at a traffic signal in the left-turn lane. When the signal turns green, the truck makes the left, drives up the on-ramp and merges into interstate highway traffic.
Andreas Wendel, Kodiak CTO, noted that, “Our system operates on local roads in multiple locations across the country.”
Torc
During the summer, I was able to experience a comprehensive demonstration of the current state of Torc’s developmental vehicles. In additional to capably handling all highway driving functions, their system can exit the highway to deliver within logistics-intensive areas, i.e. areas where streets are well structured. They’re not trying to “boil the ocean” and handle every type of surface street environment. Instead, they are addressing logistics centers where there is a minimal degree of passenger car traffic and even fewer bikes and pedestrians.
This may constitute another form of Operational Design Domain (ODD) as defined in the SAE J3016 standard. An ODD details constraints on where the ADS can operate and under what conditions. The ODD for virtually all ADS Class 8 trucks includes driving on limited access highways. The ODD may also describe weather conditions the system can handle. But while there is significant consistency across all limited-access highways, there is vast variability when it comes to streets. So, Torc has constrained their off-highway delivery to logistics centers where roads are well laid-out for trucks. This approach represents a street-level ODD in which the trucks can’t go everywhere in an urban region, but can go to a lot of places that trucks need to access.
Similar to the Kodiak video, the Torc video shows their vehicle rolling up a highway off-ramp and obeying a traffic signal to make a left turn onto an arterial street consisting of two lanes each way with turn lanes. Other traffic signals were handled and the vehicle re-entered the highway after a few miles. The lane markings were quite faded and there was a wealth of longitudinal sealing cracks in the concrete that a not-too-smart AV might mistake as a lane line (see picture below). The Torc vehicle handled the lanes just fine.
“Torc is targeting areas for future autonomous hubs that are closely coupled with existing freight centers within cities,” said Walter Grigg, Torc’s Industry Partnerships Leader. “Our ability to autonomously navigate on these surface streets will provide the advantage of scale and connect our operations to customers’ high-volume freight lanes.”
Plus
Plus is unique in AV trucking in that they offer a “highly automated driving” system – PlusDrive – which supports a supervising human truck driver by handling all driving tasks needed while on the public highway. In parallel they are developing a driverless platform called SuperDrive.
In past years, Plus developed basic capability for street driving. The company has recently ramped up this capability such that “we have the ability to run end-to-end, on streets and highway,” according to COO Shawn Kerrigan. Plus has been demonstrating both street and highway automated driving to partners and customers.
Slightly Smarter Infrastructure?
As driverless trucks proliferate over the coming years, it would be nice to have smarter traffic signals that offer signal phase and timing information via the Cloud, so that trucks approaching the intersection could download information about that specific signal’s timing from green-to-red or red-to-green. This would enable the AV truck to adjust speed, ideally avoiding a full stop: a significant amount of fuel is burned in getting a truck moving again after making a stop. Just a few bytes of information could result in important cost savings and emission reductions.
This information would be useful for today’s human truck drivers too.
For decades, I’ve been harping on this to my infrastructure colleagues. They see the value, but funds have yet to be allocated for any substantial deployment in the U.S.
Taking Notice
The first wave of automated trucks will be sticking to the interstate highways, relying heavily on highway-side transfer yards. This is job one and will drive significant revenues for the early entrants in the market.
Nevertheless, I expect that the pace of development for street driving will accelerate. For some loads hauled by some companies, the load will go dock-to-dock rather than ramp-to-ramp. Freight customers shippers will take notice.
Disclosure: I am an Advisor to and hold equity in Plus.
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