7 ms·

Daimler tests self-driving truck on German highway

49 points by spking 11y ago

kaonashi 11y ago
Same with many charities as well; they're created for PR & tax purposes, not to serve any actual public good.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  Not in this case. The "last mile" of freight distribution currently needs trucks (just imagine a city full of freight train tracks), and if these trucks could operate on their own, the likelihood of truck-bicyclist accidents alone could drop massively - not to mention the massive reduction in freight costs because the most expensive part (the human) is eliminated.
  - Bulkington 11y ago
    Not to nitpick, but fuel is the most expensive part of trucking. [1] And Level 4 automation ain't happening in long-haul trucking (in the U.S.) for a while [2]. 1: http://news.trucker.com/trucker-jobs/equipment-driver-pay-push-operating-costs-higher http://news.trucker.com/trucker-jobs/equipment-driver-pay-pu... 2: http://news.trucker.com/technology/long-road-autonomous-trucks-will-be-smooth-one-drivers http://news.trucker.com/technology/long-road-autonomous-truc...
  - aianus 11y ago
    > because the most expensive part (the human) is eliminated. I think the fuel (6 mpg!) and capital costs of the truck are considerably larger than the wages of the man driving it.
    - hugh4 11y ago
      Perhaps once labour costs are eliminated you can also improve efficiency by driving more slowly (in a truck-only lane on the freeway). You could also draft just behind other trucks. Finally I suppose you could be whatever shape is most efficient for slipping your cargo through the air without needing to worry about accommodating a pesky human.
sokoloff 11y ago
I'd be curious to know what progress they've made since I worked on VITA-2 as a Daimler intern as part of PROMETHEUS back in 1992. We also had self-driving on highway with a driver sitting attentive next to a red E-stop button to revert to manual control. We couldn't get the bus to the highway autonomously, but once there, it could self-drive. (I'm sure it's a lot better now, and the hardware much smaller (we had 3 40U racks of equipment) but I'm curious.)
- RealityVoid 11y ago
  Well, this sounds really interesting, I was just reading the wikipedia entry on Erns Dickmans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns this and the project was truly fascinating. What did you do there? What did you end up doing afterwards?
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    It was amazingly interesting. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering, but I taught myself programming at age 7 on an old TRS-80 and have basically only worked in computing my whole life. At Daimler, I worked on the computer vision system, doubling the throughput (by adding more processing nodes primarily). IIRC, we went from ~12.5 Hz to about 25Hz. That was fairly straightforward, but I also added a lot of inter-frame aware filtering, created some graphical output changes to help us better understand what the system was doing internally at any given time. That was all in Occam on transputers. I think each card held two nodes and cost about $25K. Each node was about a 486-25. We had a couple mile stretch of abandoned Autobahn a few miles away from our lab building that we would test on about once a week. (Other teams also needed the vehicle to test their systems.) We also took it to an abandoned airfield outside Munich for longer, higher-speed tests, and demos, and took it to Turin a few times for tests and pan-PROMETHEUS demos and world record runs. On a few of those test sessions, if our system was working well, I was also able to pitch in with other teams on control system algorithms, a radar ranging system, and lane/sign detection vision system work. (This is all 23+ years old, so forgive some minor discrepancies.) It was a great experience all around! (You also got me to send a LinkedIn invite to my boss there, Dr Andreas Kuehnle, now at Bendix, so thanks for the followup Qs.) When I came back and graduated, I interviewed at the US Big 3 (back when there were 3, they were big, and US... :) ) and a Ford engineer urged me to "go anyplace other than US auto". He said if I wanted to come back into motorsports or high-perf/speciality street vehicles that I was better off doing something else for 5 years and applying back directly into those units. I wish I had that guy's name and address as it was great advice. Went to a few startups that failed, went to a motorsports simulation game company that was successful and bought by Sierra-Online, then went to a satellite office of DEShaw (a hedge fund), bounced around in finance, and finally ended up at Vistaprint a few years before we went public in 2005 and I'm still there and crazy happy. I welcome any followup questions (for HN sake, followups on your former question are more interesting than the latter, but I'll answer either...)
Chefkoochooloo 11y ago
That is excellent news for road safety! I remember working with companies on lane departure detection systems back in 2007. We have come a long way... Next steps will include to have vehicle convoys where vehicles sync together to drive at same speed.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > That is excellent news for road safety! For that to be a certainty we need a lot more data than what is available today. This is very very early in the deployment of this kind of technology to make such blanket statements. It may be excellent news for road safety.
knight17 11y ago
This is a comment made at Yahoo news page: Driving trucks has been a good paying job for lots of people in the past. Between robot trucks and robot burger flippers, everything might be cheaper, but still people won't be able to afford anything. We are certainly moving to uncharted waters now. After all the automation—both mechanical and software affecting service (brain?) and labour (brawn?) industries—would there be need for humans to get things done?
- outside1234 11y ago
  Like all automation (the wheel, the combine, ...) it pushes humans up the value chain. There is no market for coolies any more either, just like there won't be for truck drivers in 15 years. The thing that is different is this time is that we have run the course on almost all unskilled labor now. The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or perish.
  - davedx 11y ago
    > The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or perish. Nice. So will there be enough jobs in this value chain for all the unemployed truck drivers?
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    The very clear issue is that not everybody can or wants to be pushed up the value chain and 'perishing' is not an option for large numbers of people in a society without that society itself perishing.
- Scarblac 11y ago
  Less and less. When joblessness goes up more, we need to go to shorter work weeks so the benefits are distributed evenly. The goal should be a future where everybody works a day every week or so (or not at all) and can afford a decent life style.
sdrothrock 11y ago
With all of the advances in self-driving cars, I wonder why we don't have research into self-driving trains.
- Rondom 11y ago
  Self-driving trains do exist. There are quite a few cities that use driverless trains. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  It's a matter of scale. A single train operator hauls thousands of people or thousands of tons of material. Getting rid of that one person hardly gains you everything. On the other hand a truck driver hardly hauls anything, maybe ten or twenty tons of cargo per driver.
- ianpurton 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

49 points by spking 11y ago

kaonashi 11y ago

Same with many charities as well; they're created for PR & tax purposes, not to serve any actual public good.

mschuster91 11y ago
Not in this case. The "last mile" of freight distribution currently needs trucks (just imagine a city full of freight train tracks), and if these trucks could operate on their own, the likelihood of truck-bicyclist accidents alone could drop massively - not to mention the massive reduction in freight costs because the most expensive part (the human) is eliminated.
- Bulkington 11y ago
  Not to nitpick, but fuel is the most expensive part of trucking. [1] And Level 4 automation ain't happening in long-haul trucking (in the U.S.) for a while [2]. 1: http://news.trucker.com/trucker-jobs/equipment-driver-pay-push-operating-costs-higher http://news.trucker.com/trucker-jobs/equipment-driver-pay-pu... 2: http://news.trucker.com/technology/long-road-autonomous-trucks-will-be-smooth-one-drivers http://news.trucker.com/technology/long-road-autonomous-truc...
- aianus 11y ago
  > because the most expensive part (the human) is eliminated. I think the fuel (6 mpg!) and capital costs of the truck are considerably larger than the wages of the man driving it.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    Perhaps once labour costs are eliminated you can also improve efficiency by driving more slowly (in a truck-only lane on the freeway). You could also draft just behind other trucks. Finally I suppose you could be whatever shape is most efficient for slipping your cargo through the air without needing to worry about accommodating a pesky human.

sokoloff 11y ago

I'd be curious to know what progress they've made since I worked on VITA-2 as a Daimler intern as part of PROMETHEUS back in 1992. We also had self-driving on highway with a driver sitting attentive next to a red E-stop button to revert to manual control. We couldn't get the bus to the highway autonomously, but once there, it could self-drive. (I'm sure it's a lot better now, and the hardware much smaller (we had 3 40U racks of equipment) but I'm curious.)

RealityVoid 11y ago
Well, this sounds really interesting, I was just reading the wikipedia entry on Erns Dickmans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns this and the project was truly fascinating. What did you do there? What did you end up doing afterwards?
- sokoloff 11y ago
  It was amazingly interesting. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering, but I taught myself programming at age 7 on an old TRS-80 and have basically only worked in computing my whole life. At Daimler, I worked on the computer vision system, doubling the throughput (by adding more processing nodes primarily). IIRC, we went from ~12.5 Hz to about 25Hz. That was fairly straightforward, but I also added a lot of inter-frame aware filtering, created some graphical output changes to help us better understand what the system was doing internally at any given time. That was all in Occam on transputers. I think each card held two nodes and cost about $25K. Each node was about a 486-25. We had a couple mile stretch of abandoned Autobahn a few miles away from our lab building that we would test on about once a week. (Other teams also needed the vehicle to test their systems.) We also took it to an abandoned airfield outside Munich for longer, higher-speed tests, and demos, and took it to Turin a few times for tests and pan-PROMETHEUS demos and world record runs. On a few of those test sessions, if our system was working well, I was also able to pitch in with other teams on control system algorithms, a radar ranging system, and lane/sign detection vision system work. (This is all 23+ years old, so forgive some minor discrepancies.) It was a great experience all around! (You also got me to send a LinkedIn invite to my boss there, Dr Andreas Kuehnle, now at Bendix, so thanks for the followup Qs.) When I came back and graduated, I interviewed at the US Big 3 (back when there were 3, they were big, and US... :) ) and a Ford engineer urged me to "go anyplace other than US auto". He said if I wanted to come back into motorsports or high-perf/speciality street vehicles that I was better off doing something else for 5 years and applying back directly into those units. I wish I had that guy's name and address as it was great advice. Went to a few startups that failed, went to a motorsports simulation game company that was successful and bought by Sierra-Online, then went to a satellite office of DEShaw (a hedge fund), bounced around in finance, and finally ended up at Vistaprint a few years before we went public in 2005 and I'm still there and crazy happy. I welcome any followup questions (for HN sake, followups on your former question are more interesting than the latter, but I'll answer either...)

Chefkoochooloo 11y ago

That is excellent news for road safety! I remember working with companies on lane departure detection systems back in 2007. We have come a long way... Next steps will include to have vehicle convoys where vehicles sync together to drive at same speed.

jacquesm 11y ago
> That is excellent news for road safety! For that to be a certainty we need a lot more data than what is available today. This is very very early in the deployment of this kind of technology to make such blanket statements. It may be excellent news for road safety.

knight17 11y ago

This is a comment made at Yahoo news page: Driving trucks has been a good paying job for lots of people in the past. Between robot trucks and robot burger flippers, everything might be cheaper, but still people won't be able to afford anything. We are certainly moving to uncharted waters now. After all the automation—both mechanical and software affecting service (brain?) and labour (brawn?) industries—would there be need for humans to get things done?

outside1234 11y ago
Like all automation (the wheel, the combine, ...) it pushes humans up the value chain. There is no market for coolies any more either, just like there won't be for truck drivers in 15 years. The thing that is different is this time is that we have run the course on almost all unskilled labor now. The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or perish.
- davedx 11y ago
  > The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or perish. Nice. So will there be enough jobs in this value chain for all the unemployed truck drivers?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  The very clear issue is that not everybody can or wants to be pushed up the value chain and 'perishing' is not an option for large numbers of people in a society without that society itself perishing.
Scarblac 11y ago
Less and less. When joblessness goes up more, we need to go to shorter work weeks so the benefits are distributed evenly. The goal should be a future where everybody works a day every week or so (or not at all) and can afford a decent life style.

sdrothrock 11y ago

With all of the advances in self-driving cars, I wonder why we don't have research into self-driving trains.

Rondom 11y ago
Self-driving trains do exist. There are quite a few cities that use driverless trains. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
thrownaway2424 11y ago
It's a matter of scale. A single train operator hauls thousands of people or thousands of tons of material. Getting rid of that one person hardly gains you everything. On the other hand a truck driver hardly hauls anything, maybe ten or twenty tons of cargo per driver.
ianpurton 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway