Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?
phenomenalworld.org
phenomenalworld.org
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.
That said Waymo has a pretty good safety record and Uber's program got shut down after the above.
(The answer is no one: https://abc7.com/post/mary-fong-lau-crash-driver-killed-fami...)
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
How is that a thing? They don’t have an address but can get a commercial driver’s license. What do they put on the form for an address “patch of woods by I-95”, a PO box?
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
"No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon"
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
Looking at the SAE standards document [0], I can think of a few people I know who only technically reach Level 3. Mostly older women, to be honest. They are only going to drive under certain well defined conditions and will put someone else in the hot seat the trip will be outside a limited comfort zone. They would need someone else to be able to step in at a moments notice to operate a vehicle truly safely. As an aside; the older men are more willing to be adventurous, but also more likely to kill themselves and/or run someone else over based on my experiences with accidents. And in an AI from an engineering perspective that probably bumps them more towards Level 2.
But a truck isn't going to be facing level 5 conditions in the vast majority of circumstances where it is generating economic value. It's probably going to be going in a straight line down a highway or parking in a loading bay.
EDIT And drug/alcohol affected road users probably deserve their own paragraph; but I'm not going to make time to type it up. Just because they might not ask doesn't mean they don't need someone else to drive for them.
[0] https://saemobilus.sae.org/standards/j3016_202609-taxonomy-d...
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers. 3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
vid https://youtu.be/jTRHEtfdxOo?t=436
Now starting in the US apparently. The ones in the vid charge from solar during the day. Seems quite a good system.
Is there a rough estimate of how many miles are mostly hub-to-hub and (can) by-pass urban zones?
> keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town
My analysis is <150KW PV per tractor. So 7MW is very C&I scale. Scheduling can be tricky.
> having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers
This is the L5 fallacy. We will get commercial viability way before L5.
> keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.
if we're on the former path, you're right. if we're on the later, there comes a point where continued work in automation isn't cost effective and we keep the humans around to handle all the hard 'edge cases' like urban driving to the final warehouse
I feel like given the danger these vehicles represent that their location should be published publicly so that humans can avoid the highway when they are near and possibly plan alternative routes.
Also, I believe that part of the "plan" is to eventually once the technology hits it limit of effectiveness (cant get any better but is still deadly), flood the highways with enough of them and autonomous cars to scare humans off the roads. There will be a tipping point where humans wont feel safe driving on the roads with these vehicles in large enough numbers (because they arent).
At that point we will be paying taxes for robot highways, and to fund liability protections for tech companies.
In short, "autonomous cars scare humans off the roads" (or even "most major roads are legally for autonomous cars only, private cars are legally banned on them") is something that a substantial number of people are openly and actively hoping for, because they expect it will save about 40,000 lives a year in the US (and more worldwide).
I personally have qualms about this because I don't like the idea that people will be dependent on autonomous cars - likely controlled by some far-away authority - to get around. On the other hand, 40,000 American road deaths per year, that's a lot of preventable death.
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/semi-truck-driver-dead...
Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.
I'm continually shocked that people criticize autonomous vehicles along these lines... like where do you live in the US that gives you such a high opinion of human drivers? Daily dipshit human driving behaviors and a frequent cadence of bad accidents or fatalities seems the norm across major metro areas.
If more robots can drive we can actually have a hard test to pass for driving. Right now basically anyone can drive because it is too expensive to tolerate it being any different given the extent with which transportation and the economy in America is built around cars. The only people who will manually drive are people that really want to. Which is how it should be. You shouldn't be operating a vehicle if all you really want is just to appear x miles away while being able to dick around on your phone or fall asleep or whatever is causing all the lazy driving behaviors we all see around us everyday.
Why over-index on a handful of autonomous driving related fatalities? How many humans kill other humans in cars? Do we ban all cars? Why do you think robot cars will necessarily always be worse drivers than human ones?
> Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.