It might begin very soon

I got to ride in one of these trucks 5yrs ago on the freeways in downtown Detroit.

One of the big things was these trucks could be set up to draft off of other trucks. Their tests were suggesting fuel savings of upwards of 20%.

time2roll wrote:
With all the cameras will the automated trucks be able to submit people driving illegal or unsafe manor?
Like if they cut off the truck slam on the brakes and subsequently merge off the interstate. All in a day's drive here in the city.

Cameras are everywhere. All new cars have them.

For trucking companies, this is great as their automated trucks will have all the info to prove they weren't at fault. If something strange happens and the truck is at fault, they can point to the manufacturer but really that's far less likely than a human driver doing something stupid.

If a human truck driver does something stupid, the cameras will prove he is at fault but the trucking company is the one who will pay for the lawsuit.

pnichols wrote:
Scarry is right!!

Imagine how full of integrated circuits, complex mechanical components, and communications equipment (for Internet and/or satellite connectivity) ... those trucks will be full of. All of tlhat can, and will, fail here and there over time.

I hope that transportation regulations require those trucks to be clearly marked - including distinctive night lighting - so that the rest of us can stay well away from them on the highways.

P.S. Maybe I spent too many years working in the integrated circuits industry and too many hours watching those cable reality shows about big rig accident disasters in Alaska - most which have nothing to do with human error - but can be blamed on 80,000 lbs. of freight inter-acting with the laws of physics.

Someday in the near future we will think it's scary when a human is behind the wheel. "What if the driver falls asleep?" "What if the driver is not paying attention or has a medical problem"

Dan

JIMNLIN wrote:
A trucker drives his rig to either a shipping point or the delivery point. He has to stop at the security gate out front for farther information or get out of his rig, once he is in the yard, and find a receiving/shipping person and get a dock number and a load/unload time. Sometimes the driver is told to leave and come back at another time.
I doubt the warehouse/customer is going to spend millions of bucks setting up a system to handle drivers free trucks.

I can see how a intermodel shipping yard like UP or BNSF could use driver less pony trucks to move containers around in those huge yards.

Capitalism will solve it for them.

If you want an old style driver, you will pay significantly more for deliveries and likely will not get guaranteed on time delivery.

Big warehouses will be happy to spend millions (though that's a big overstatement of the cost). If they are saving $1000 per delivery and they get 200 trucks per day...you can justify a pretty expensive warehouse upgrade.

But really, the systems we are talking about won't require physical upgrades for the most part. If a truck driver can get the truck in, the computer can do it. There may be an app that the warehouse manager has to keep track of...but lets say he's running behind, the incoming trucks may simply slow down 50 miles out from 65 to 55, so they arrive when the load bay is free.

wapiticountry wrote:
One of the biggest hurdles to automated driving are ethical decision trees. What will the programming be when the vehicle is faced with multiple bad outcomes? Will it be programmed to protect the vehicle at all costs, keeping it out of the ditch and running into a child instead? Will it be programmed to go the other way and veer into the ditch and miss what it thought was a child, but was actually a bag of trash in the middle of the highway possibly careening out of control and crashing into homes, businesses etc? There is a lot of information available on this problem and it is scary to realize there may actually be computer code that makes the decision to deliberately kill you in an effort to protect someone else.

And what happens when a truck driver makes the same mistakes?

Unless Asimov's 3 laws blows up and the trucks decide we are better off locked in our houses, it's not really a big worry.

With all the cameras will the automated trucks be able to submit people driving illegal or unsafe manor?
Like if they cut off the truck slam on the brakes and subsequently merge off the interstate. All in a day's drive here in the city.

No more Trucker bombs? What are the inmates going to pickup along the road?

wapiticountry wrote:
One of the biggest hurdles to automated driving are ethical decision trees. What will the programming be when the vehicle is faced with multiple bad outcomes? Will it be programmed to protect the vehicle at all costs, keeping it out of the ditch and running into a child instead? Will it be programmed to go the other way and veer into the ditch and miss what it thought was a child, but was actually a bag of trash in the middle of the highway possibly careening out of control and crashing into homes, businesses etc? There is a lot of information available on this problem and it is scary to realize there may actually be computer code that makes the decision to deliberately kill you in an effort to protect someone else.

Agreed, this is the issue that will slow the development and implementation of autonomous vehicles. Computers excel (no pun intended) at processing massive quantities of ones and zeros but still cannot really think abstractly like a human mind. Things like pulling to the right for an emergency vehicle, but in some instances pulling to the left or just stopping makes more sense to help the emergency vehicle get by, following the instructions of a police officer directing traffic at an emergency scene, interpreting lane reductions in a construction zone, those are all things that people are often pretty bad at but impossible for a computer to do. Human nature in general plays a part in the acceptance of automation- for some reason people are relatively tolerant of human error, but completely intolerant of an accident being caused by a failure of technology.

JIMNLIN wrote:
I doubt the warehouse/customer is going to spend millions of bucks setting up a system to handle drivers free trucks.

They will when they own the warehouses and the trucks -- like Amazon, Walmart, etc. And when other warehouses have to pay a premium to send a human operated truck to Amazon's warehouses since their drivers get queued up behind a driverlesss truck that doesn't mind waiting for 10 hours to unload, they'll start to make accommodations for the driverless trucks. Which could be as simple as a parking area -- driverless trucks come in an park where it waits for a human driver to take over.

A trucker drives his rig to either a shipping point or the delivery point. He has to stop at the security gate out front for farther information or get out of his rig, once he is in the yard, and find a receiving/shipping person and get a dock number and a load/unload time. Sometimes the driver is told to leave and come back at another time.
I doubt the warehouse/customer is going to spend millions of bucks setting up a system to handle drivers free trucks.

I can see how a intermodel shipping yard like UP or BNSF could use driver less pony trucks to move containers around in those huge yards.