Waymo Self-Driving Trucks
Just days after Uber announced its self-driving truck tests, Waymo announced it’ll soon be testing self-driving trucks in Atlanta. But unlike Uber, which is assisting deliveries between shippers and receivers, Waymo will only be delivering freight to its own data centers in Atlanta.
Waymo is leading the autonomous vehicle space, so it’s self-driving trucks use the same suite of custom-built sensors that power its self-driving minivan. For the foreseeable future, Waymo said it will have “highly-trained drivers in the cabs to monitor systems and take control if needed.”
Waymo first began testing its autonomous technology on Class-8 tractor trailers last year in California and Arizona.
What would be accepted today by both drivers and trucking companies is driver assistance systems. Hardware to help with safe following, and especially, systems to help keep the speed safe as road conditions change, while alerting the drivers to conditions ahead. Reducing fatigue while improving driver awareness would be accepted by both sides of the issue. Who could argue with improving both safety and profits?
Here is another question, which is, how many different responses does the truck control computer have for any given situation, either actual or possible? The lack of the correct response is why the UBER car killed that woman in Florida. The car had only two choices and both were wrong! When the computer vision system noticed the woman next to the road it should have moved away, either into the next lane, or at least to the far edge of it’s own lane. That is what a smart human driver would do. . But it is certain that the computer only saw a clear lane and thus it was not in a position to avoid hitting the poor woman. If the car had been on the left edge of it’s lane it would have either missed her or just grazed her, but instead it saw no potential problem and so went on with it’s program of staying in the lane center. This is the intrinsic flaw in computer driven cars and there is no way to fix it. The best approach would be to stop wasting money before hundreds of folks die!