Volvo Hub2Hub Self-Driving Truck
Volvo unveiled in November 2017 an autonomous concept truck for hub-to-hub transportations in semi-confined areas like harbors and dedicated lanes on highways. Volvo said the truck is based on its existing FH platform and navigates autonomously using LIDAR and GPS.
“Although this technology may be years away from production, it will undoubtedly influence our future offering and has the potential to develop smart societies for the future,” said Martin Lundstedt, president and CEO at Volvo Group. “No matter what type of solution we develop, safety is always our primary concern and this applies to all our self-driving projects.”
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!