231–240 of 435 posts
48k miles in the interstate = 80k km, 400k posts, 4 billion dollars (and you can start regionally)
could also run semi-autonomous convoys where a robot truck follows a human truck, extending sensor range
I didn't expect fully autonomous trucking to be here yet. What I did expect, however, is semi-autonomous many-trailer trucks/convoys, because it's a much simpler technical problem that still offers enormous efficiency gains. Let's get a little bit crazy and imagine something very different from what we have today, but still only requiring a single driver. One truck cab at the front. Individual trailers have their own…
Maybe we could make the infrastructure cheaper, add some power lines and maybe make the road surface from steel for low friction!
Just think about it. You're starting a company and the first thing you need to do is spend a few billion dollars before you move your first ton? Doomed company.
This is the classic problem with rail: you need to plan the route so you have sufficient participants willing to fund development, you need to acquire land (which you can't safely do piecemeal because the guy down the line will extort you).
wonder how much of this could be solved with a $10000 sensor post every 200m of road? 48k miles in the interstate = 80k km, 400k posts, 4 billion dollars (and you can start regionally) could also run semi-autonomous convoys where a robot truck follows a human truck, extending sensor range
Driverless trains put about half the system logic outside the vehicles and those things operate mostly incident free
Great post with good details. I wonder whether a "truck only" roadway might be a reasonable simplifier here (yes building a 1000 miles of road for trucks only is billions of $ but there are perhaps segments between say ports and warehouses where that might make sense. And as someone who has been fooling around with robotics since the 80's the whole "sensors have to see far enough ahead to respond" is well known. The…
You must mean a railway then ? Edit: by the way, why don't we have autonomous freight trains?
I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…
The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.
wonder how much of this could be solved with a $10000 sensor post every 200m of road? 48k miles in the interstate = 80k km, 400k posts, 4 billion dollars (and you can start regionally) could also run semi-autonomous convoys where a robot truck follows a human truck, extending sensor range
The in cab electronic log system is still largely ignored because states want money from inspections, no autonomous system can handle a tandem adjustment, and everyone wants to put sensors all over roads that barely see replacement let alone investment and dont have maintenance factored in.
Edit: ultimately these companies miss the mark. Autonomous cannot cost more to maintain and operate than traditional fleets and owner operator/independents. It can't force shipping lots to rearchitect the entire parking lot, it can't demand world class networking and sensor systems in jeffrey Wyoming, and it can't wave away traditional safe operation practices with "autonomous"
wonder how much of this could be solved with a $10000 sensor post every 200m of road? 48k miles in the interstate = 80k km, 400k posts, 4 billion dollars (and you can start regionally) could also run semi-autonomous convoys where a robot truck follows a human truck, extending sensor range
Yeah I’ve wondered this too I think the safest path to driverless if we insist on deploying that technology is deployment into road infrastructure Driverless trains put about half the system logic outside the vehicles and those things operate mostly incident free
if gov owns the sensors, they no longer have to beg AV operators for crash data
This is a video from our firefighters here in slovenia... Humans are shitty drivers, sure, but how the hell would a computer react to a chaos like this?
wonder how much of this could be solved with a $10000 sensor post every 200m of road? 48k miles in the interstate = 80k km, 400k posts, 4 billion dollars (and you can start regionally) could also run semi-autonomous convoys where a robot truck follows a human truck, extending sensor range
Alternatively a drone flying ahead of a truck with cameras could augment the sensing on the truck and extend the sensor range. Deploy the drone(s) from a station on the truck. 2-3 drones per truck for redundancy and charging. Tho maybe drones can not fly at 65mph for long in bad weather.
wonder how much of this could be solved with a $10000 sensor post every 200m of road? 48k miles in the interstate = 80k km, 400k posts, 4 billion dollars (and you can start regionally) could also run semi-autonomous convoys where a robot truck follows a human truck, extending sensor range
I'm a diesel engine mechanic by trade, and having been to a few mid america trucking shows I can definitively say the autonomous trucking scenes pretty dead in the water. Too many "ideal condition" technologies, not enough edge condition focus (lots with no turnaround, lots with poor traction or mud,etc...) And too many companies demanding infrastructure investment that won't come. The in cab electronic log system is…