Hacker News Reader

Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

How realistic are the trucking sims? Do you actually get gas and unload? Highway stuff and regular driving sounds good but backing a trailer up to Walmart video game style sounds frightening.

View on HN

Pretty good for the expensive ones. They are not video games though, and so they are not making the shortcuts games do to make them fun. I've driven a few (snow plow, excavator) and they are very hard to control - then I see someone who drives that machine professionally get on: they get a near perfect score and comment about how real it feels. Note that part of the sim is the controls: they take the cab from a real machine and replace the windshield with a screen (for version 1, often version 2 starts to take away parts, but everything you touch including the seat is the real thing).

I've long thought that to renew your drivers license you should have to spend a day every few months in a simulator to prove you can drive safely. Do you maintain a safe following distance? Can you maintain the speed limit? Do you stop for pedestrians? Do you zipper merge correctly? Here is a situation where someone else screwed up and you will crash, can you choose the best crash? Here is an icy road, can you control the car? there is a lot that modern simulators can do but few people have used them.

I agree with you on the DL renewal based on a sim.

Interestingly: The base CDL is a one and done skill test. There are no CPEs like with other regulated industries (nurses/teachers/investment advisors) - but there is a health and fitness check.

The difficult part is actually the last mile/few miles in trucking. Open highway driving is a significantly less complicated problem than navigating down side streets then backing into a warehouse to complete a delivery.

Freight tech companies have been talking about automating every BUT the last mile/last few miles for years. Have a stable of drivers who you have on hand to take over the last hour of a delivery. Automate everything else.

The nice thing about this is also that truckers would be able to go home everynight which would make the job more attractive

We can do that scary bit autonomously already: https://www.outrider.ai/

I'm not referring to "sim", I'm referring to remote piloting. Real time sensor and controls feedback from a truck that is only autonomous when it makes sense to be. We can pilot drones over 100s of yards in real time without a hitch. We just need a bit more range (few kms) via, say, the internet, and you can do this fairly easily. I don't see a research problem, I see a funding problem and an aversion to autonomous trucking b/c people think it's either completely infeasible, or completely solved by Aurora. I'm not sure of either.

And what does the driverless truck do when it loses its internet connection at 70mph on a freeway?

The use case does not include operating remotely at 70mph on freeways, esp because internet connectivity is hard over most the USA. That bit is mostly lvl 3/4, and is something that is addressed well by other companies. It's the long tail between lvl3/4 and all the scenarios that remain in which a remote driver solves the problem. Esp in logistics yards, which are chaotic, fast paced, and driven by voice communication.

OTOH we dock manned spaceships to the ISS video game style

That is a much easier problem than backing a truck up to a loading bay. Even landing an airplane is a lot easier if you have an ILS. Space and the air are mostly empty. A warehouse loading area is cluttered with other trucks, debris, and cargo. Although I could totally see this being done remotely with VR and a ton of cameras.

Agree with you.

Just to add spice the convo: Backing into a loading bay is quite easy, autonomously. Once you stage the truck you can push a button and just watch it go. See: https://outrider.ai (which is where I work, and we do all the staging _also_, but I'm actually interested in "everything else" as well). There's a lot of very human-ish problems to get to that state, that I think remote operators can really help with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com