>> A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat.
This is how you know a vehicle is self-driving: there are two people sat in the front.
This is how you know a vehicle is self-driving: there are two people sat in the front.
I understand they organisers wanted something cool, but it was comical to observe nonetheless.
[Edit: punctuation]
Lockers (or luggage storage generally outside of hotels) are, in general, pretty scarce in the US--and at least a lot of Europe in my experience. It's one of the things that makes a regular hotel pretty handy; I can drop off my luggage the day I arrive or leave and not have to restrict my activities until it's time to checkin or depart.
The main railway station in a European town sometimes has luggage storage. In Germany that's usually lockers, in countries with more history of terrorism (like the UK) it's a room with a metal detector and an attendant.
A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work, and can respond to onsite issues more promptly and accurately than could a remote one.
People working full time still need to live you know, even if it's "less work". Last time I checked the "amount" of work doesn't really correlate with the pay too.
You can't tell a professional truck driver "Ok man, you'll be in the same seat, on the same road, for the same amount of time but you get $500 instead of $1500 because it's less work, oh and also if there is a crash and you weren't 100% focused you'll be liable for the damage"
Automating large parts of the driving process would make the job easier and more desirable. More people would be willing to work as monitors, which would increase truck availability and lower rates.
There’s also the possibility that a monitor could do other work while the truck drove. Team drivers already do this; the passive driver occupies herself when not driving by reading or even dispatching other loads.
All the studies say this is actually more dangerous, which is why Waymo abandoned L3 development years ago when they discovered their safety drivers were falling asleep at the wheel. And there's the infamous Uber death which is well documented and analyzed.
"Monitor" might be a misnomer, here, in that the monitor isn't expected to be actively watching what the truck is doing; rather the monitor would be expected to respond to infrequent issues and maybe handle off-highway driving to and from shipping and receiving facilities.
A monitor probably needs more knowledge than a driver (need to know the specifics of the product, how to fix problems etc.), and has the same downsides (long hours, not especially exciting job, bad work hours, sitting all the time etc.). If anything I would think they would be paid more.
In my view the monitor would be a driver with standard knowledge and experience who could drive if the autonomous system encountered an edge case or for last-mile, i.e., from the freeway to the shipping or receiving facility.
Under those circumstances a load traveling ten hours with six hours of loading and unloading time would require two hours of active work and fourteen hours of standby.
Any driver would accept a lower rate for this kind of arrangement.
It’s not the same process as the autonomous urban driving being attempted by Waymo et al. Driving from Phoenix to Dallas on the highway is far simpler than driving around Phoenix.
Major West: And the monkey flips the switch. -- Lost In Space, 1998
Instructions can be, push the big red button if anything happens.
The monitor would be in place to manage the last-mile driving and any other technically-challenging aberrations on the route. Human skill and judgement would still be required, just for much shorter periods.