Autonomous truck covered 4,500 kilometers alone
A start-up from Silicon Valley has just announced that it has completed its first commercial drive from coast to coast using its autonomous truck. Does this mean an industry breakthrough?
Plus.ai has just been a great success in the field of transporting goods by means of autonomous trucks, because as we have just learned, one of these vehicles covered 4.5 thousand kilometers dividing the American coast in less than 3 days. The company confirms that this is a car serving as a cold store, in which 18 tons of butter was transported this time. The car during the trip completely relied on sensors, cameras, radars, Lidar system (detection of light and distance) and computer imaging assisted by artificial intelligence.
Of course, for various reasons, both the safety driver and one of the company's engineers were on board, because the safety of many other traffic participants is at stake. However, as Plus.ai boasts, they were completely unnecessary and during the three days they didn't even lift a finger: - It's a big deal. This trip across the country shows the safety, efficiency and maturity of our autonomous trucks, which already deliver loads to our partners a few days a week. Continuing to improve our autonomous trucks will make such fast raids from coast to coast become the norm in the future, says group co-founder Shawn Kerrigan.
As Professor David Bailey from the University of Birmingham Business School adds, a trip from Tulare on the west coast to Quakertown in the east is really a big deal: - While many commentators have been excited by autonomous cars in recent years, there was definitely nothing to talk about and we had rather dealing with excessive enthusiasm. It is important, however, that laying the foundations for these new technologies is still happening, as evidenced by the autonomous course of the Plus.ai vehicle.
It is worth mentioning here that Daimler and Tesla are also working on similar solutions, and even Uber was also interested, but they were recently focused typically on passenger cars. What's more, as noted by Tom Bruls from the University of Oxford Robotics Institute in an interview with BBC News, there are also other concerns with similar successes, such as TuSimple and Embark, which completed the 3862 kilometer route in February. He also adds that the trucks are comfortable because they are about straight highway routes, where all vehicles move in one direction and with similar speed, and only the beginning and end of the route is a greater challenge, so it can actually be the future of deliveries, especially on such markets like the US or Australia.