Just spitballing but it seems a unique aspect of a human driver is their fear for loss of life. We're all subtly terrified we are about to die and that keeps us sharp and responsive and thoughtful while driving.
I wish.
Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
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Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#12I think there are some good points here but IMHO this is overly focused on flawless
100% of the time L5 autonomy. Many autonomous trucking companies can become economically viable without perfection because 1. They aren’t dealing with consumers directly 2. Can control or focus on specific well understood shipping lanes 3. Can provide more human in the loop assistance for tricky situations. In this way trucking is easier than ride sharing because there is a longer on ramp (no pun intended) for companies to improve tech while being viable businesses
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#13"Now let’s compare these distances with the capabilities of various sensors:"
Many cars monitor rotational speed of the tires in order to determine whether a wheel is slipping. A Model 3 can detect whether a tire is new or old based on tread depth, something I learned the hard way.
If trucks were outfitted with rotational encoders on all tires, 'slipperiness' could be monitored periodically by, for example, tapping brakes and checking whether all wheels continue to rotate at the same speed. In emergency braking or maneuvering, the rotational speed of all tires can be input to the recovery algorithm to perform braking. If the brakes are independently controlled, this can be performed per wheel.
More generally, trucks run in fleets and on routes. Similar to aircraft reporting turbulence so the next craft can adjust, trucks can report road conditions so that approaching trucks can adjust their speed or pull over completely if conditions are so bad.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#14This article is certainly interesting, but none of these arguments are new so it could have been written five years ago.
It would be interesting to hear what a company like Aurora and their backers were thinking back in 2020. It seems unlikely that they did not come up with these arguments themselves, so what were the counterarguments?
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#15Just spitballing but it seems a unique aspect of a human driver is their fear for loss of life. We're all subtly terrified we are about to die and that keeps us sharp and responsive and thoughtful while driving.
Is this satire? That’s not how humans work at all. Even a very rational player will make a relative trade off call of the probability of an action having an outcome and the size of the outcome. Case in point: driving with almost no sleep, driving while drinking, etc. and humans are quite often irrational and take risks just because they’re seeking the adrenaline rush. And that’s for their own life. We can easily also discount the life of strangers behind an abstract “I don’t know them” mask.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#16Another issue will be piracy.
Stop the truck using a couple of vehicles, cut open the lock on the rear doors, and loot. Pick an isolated stretch of toad, and the pirates will be gone before anyone can respond.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#17Another issue will be piracy. Stop the truck using a couple of vehicles, cut open the lock on the rear doors, and loot. Pick an isolated stretch of toad, and the pirates will be gone before anyone can respond.
You can already do that, the driver wont defend the payload
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#18Another issue will be piracy. Stop the truck using a couple of vehicles, cut open the lock on the rear doors, and loot. Pick an isolated stretch of toad, and the pirates will be gone before anyone can respond.
Why isn’t this an issue today? It’s not like the driver is going to challenge you if you show up with firearms
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#19Sensors and their ranges aren't the right thing to point to. Off-the-shelf options are typically geared towards the ranges useful for passenger vehicles because that's where the volume is, but with money and time one can design something different. It's possible to achieve a sensible link budget for lidar or radar at much-longer ranges. The sensors will be bigger, they'll consume more power, and they'll cost more. But it's totally achievable.
There are a lot of differences between passenger vehicles and trucks. The physical dynamics of articulated vehicles, the mission profile, and social dynamics come to mind. How does a robotruck place cones or flares while it awaits rescue?
Personally, I expect autonomous trucking to be a force-multiplier for humans who were formerly drivers. Such trucks will have sleeper cabs and the human will be there to maintain the vehicle and handle the long tail of tasks (filling tires, cleaning, refueling, repairs, rigging, whatever). You'll get 24-hour operation out of a single human employee because they'll be able to sleep and do other things most of the time. Maybe they'll work a second job as a remote call-center operator.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#20This is strange.
- Sensing distance is a good one for sure. At the same time, it's for now a technical issue. So that a viable temporary progress-making solution might be to have an additional vehicle in the autonomous system: a sensing car is in front, and one or more semi-trucks follow. Then the autonomous system far out-senses a human driver. And we get progress even if the cost-proposition becomes a little harder.
But otherwise:
- Nominal stopping distance as shown include 2.5 seconds of reaction time - fair for a human driver perhaps but hopefully the machine gains a lot of space there.
- "Stopping in lane" is as insane in the city as it is on a freeway. We can't seriously consider that a long term solution in the city? Less risk temporarily okay but not a serious solution. (But fair point on this one: if all else fails it is, for now, an option in the city).
- Even for humans, driving on the freeway is not a question of perfect judgement. It is about quickly but calmly picking a reasonable solution. Including, in doubt, moving to a safer lane and slowing down while measuring the risk of rear-ending. Nobody asks a human to completely eliminate the risk of rear-ending. That sounds within the range of what software can do?
- Jack-knifing and other complex behaviors are probably far better suited to computing solutions - which can sense far more measurements than the humans, independently actuate more control points, and compute actually more or less complete solutions when the human is seat-of-the-pants -ing in real time (with dubious real life record too - see brutal and fatal). Simple no, but all that hard to beat the human sounds absurd (anyone with more input on this?) See for example the drift-parallel-parking stunts achieved with cars. We may not yet be at drift-parallel-parking semi-trucks but anyone here doubts that this is achievable?
- Ease and quantity of samples might be a better point. Waymo really got on it and accumulated a lot of driving data. But then also, most of that data by now is city driving.
- Will trucks happen before cars? Well, cars are already there so... already answered.