Autonomous trucking is a rising trend.
Autonomous vehicles have their obstacles: regulations and system validation. Yet, autonomous trucking developers have displayed use cases where AVs can shine bright in the trucking industry. These AV developers have also proven AV trucking technology over hundreds of thousands of miles and counting.
Arn Hayden works in business development for technology company Trimble, which serves the trucking industry. Trimble provides the positioning system to some of these developers “down to 5 to 10 centimeters of accuracy,” he said, which is critical for the safe operation of AVs.
Trimble’s technology has been proven in the AV arena at Level 2 and Level 3 automation over 178 million miles, Hayden said during the Trimble Transportation 2024 Insight Tech Conference and Expo.
AV technology “is here already in those lower levels of autonomy, and it's just a matter of time before it transitions into Level 4,” Hayden said. “I think we're there in many ways right now.”
These trucks are currently tested with drivers in the cab. But how long until these driverless trucks are in fact driverless?
See also: Trucking’s ‘driverless era’ revs up
Where are trucking’s AVs today?
Aurora, an AV developer focused on the trucking industry, has tested its technology in trucks on real commercial partner routes, hauling 7,000 loads over nearly 2 million miles. Later this year, the company will put its partners’ drivers in the cab of their autonomous trucks “to evaluate autonomy performance before driverless operations,” Aurora stated in a press release.
Aurora trucks often travel between Dallas and Houston, Texas, on Interstate 45.
“They leave their origin and make their destination without the need for human involvement upwards of 80% of the time,” Zac Andreoni, Aurora VP of business development, said during a presentation at the American Trucking Associations Management Conference and Expo earlier this month.
Kodiak, another AV developer, recently celebrated a milestone with trucking partner J.B. Hunt. The two companies completed more than 50,000 autonomously driven miles in a weekly delivery application, shipping tires between South Carolina and Dallas, Texas. From January to August, autonomous trucks have traveled the lane with 100% on-time deliveries and no accidents.
The AV developer has also already completed actual fleet hauls without a driver in the cab, running on privately leased roads in Texas and New Mexico. This marked the first reported time that a heavy-duty truck has hauled freight without a driver.
Further, Kodiak recently announced the completion of 1,000 successful autonomous safety inspections through the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s “enhanced inspection” program designed for autonomous trucks, omitting yet another obstacle to the implementation of autonomous Class 8 trucks on the roads—inspections.
See also: The current state of autonomous trucking
To ensure these vehicles are safe for on-road, driverless operations, Aurora is building a safety case through simulations, and the company has been pleased with the simulation results.
In one series of simulations, Aurora compiled data of real, fatal crashes involving heavy-duty trucks between Dallas and Houston along the I-45 corridor from 2018 to 2022.
“There were 29 [cases] where we could have put ourselves in the situation of the truck that caused the crash,” Andreoni said. “In all 29 cases, we were able to avoid the incident. ... That is incredibly powerful. That is lives that could have been saved through this technology, potentially.”
Frank Mabry, senior analyst of corporate strategy at Torc Robotics, another AV developer, said during the Trimble conference that unlike human drivers who get easily distracted, AVs use “a computer that has a 360-degree field of view that sees every millisecond and is not distracted.”
These AV platforms also have multiple redundancy systems in place, so that if one component fails, the truck will continue to perform in the safest way possible, which could ultimately lead to far fewer accidents on the roads.
Use cases of AVs in trucking
Autonomous trucking isn’t for every trucking application, however. Many of the top AV trucking companies are developing their trucks to perform primarily in middle-mile applications where interstate travel is most prominent.
Aurora plans to launch its autonomous vehicle platform within the trucking space as a terminal-to-terminal solution.
“Carriers will bring trailers to our facilities, we will take it middle mile autonomously, and the carrier can then pick it up and take it to the destination,” Andreoni explained.
Similarly, Torc’s Mabry agrees. He believes AVs will move planned, profitable freight for commercial customers through the customers’ own shipping networks.
But ultimately, director of external affairs at Kodiak, Daniel Goff, thinks it will be up to the fleet to build their network around this new technology.
“A lot of the work that we're doing today is around helping fleets think through how to build their networks around this technology,” Goff explained during the Trimble conference. “How to basically build the network and identify the lanes where this technology can be most useful, so that [fleets] are as ready as possible when we are ready to deploy the technology to really take advantage of it on day one.”
See also: Kodiak launches next autonomous truckport at Ryder facility in Texas
Obstacles to autonomy in trucking
Over the millions of autonomous miles Aurora has driven, the company claims impressive success rates, and the accidents these AVs have been involved in are from other motorists hitting the autonomous trucks, Andreoni said.
“I don't think there's a ton of ambiguity about the safety of this technology, particularly in this testing phase,” Goff explained.
Goff said that the AV developers are testing their vehicles according to the regulations and safety requirements of the states in which the testing takes place, and that “the states that have allowed [AVs] are making their roads safer as a result.”
So, what’s keeping autonomous trucks from traversing interstates today?
With California making headlines due to its refusal to allow autonomous truck testing on its roads, regulations come to mind as a major hurdle. But autonomous truck developers are hopeful that California’s Department of Motor Vehicles’ recent AV draft regulations will pass and allow testing soon.
“I think it's a big step forward to being able to deploy this technology in the largest and probably most important freight market in the country,” Goff said of the draft regulations.
See also: California governor vetoes autonomous truck regulations
Goff also believes that while current testing is mandated on a state-by-state basis, because of the nature of interstate trucking, a federal framework is necessary to get AVs on roads.
However, Goff said “there are only a handful of regulatory barriers” keeping AVs from deployment; while a larger barrier is building that safety case, such as Aurora is doing through simulations, which would provide “proof” that the vehicles are safe “using a variety of different technical approaches and statistical analyses,” Goff said.
Torc Robotics recently celebrated a validation milestone, successfully completing trial runs at 65 mpg on closed, multi-lane tracks, which helps propel the company to its goal of using these AVs within trucking fleets by 2027.
Another obstacle is simply the passage of time and further development, Mabry said comparing AVs to gigabyte hard drives, noting that in the 1990s, a 1GB hard drive was the size of a credit card and cost thousands of dollars. Today, a 10GB hard drive costs less than $10 and is roughly the size of a paperclip.
“We're finally getting hardware that's fast enough to process all the data and do the things that these [AV] systems do,” Mabry said. “That's only going to get better and better as we go, and cheaper and cheaper as we go.”
See also: Truck drivers and autonomous trucks: A powerful partnership for America's future
“Ten years ago, if you’d have come to me and said, ‘We’re going to have autonomous Class 8 vehicles,’ I would have said you’re crazy,” Mabry said. “Right now, I've been in the trucks. They're coming. They're coming fast. The technology is here, and it's just progressing.”
