11 ms·
Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days
- new_realist 7y agoThat’s nothing. Tesla promises an autonomous coast to coast drive sometime in 2017.
- elizabethholmes 7y ago"What is my purpose?" "You pass butter."
- TAForObvReasons 7y agoThis is an impressive feat but something is confusing. Picture caption: > A safety driver was behind the wheel, but the truck drove _mostly_ autonomously. Body text: > A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck > There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said. What is the "mostly" qualifier in the picture caption referring to?
- bsder 7y agoProbably refueling. I can't imagine the truck drives into a truck stop autonomously.
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoI wish I had posted this link..it’s a much better one and gives more details https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck-completes-coast-to-coast-delivery-in-3-days/568729/ https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck... [..]To comply with hours of service (HOS) requirements, Shawn Kerrigan, COO and co-founder of Plus.ai, told Supply Chain Dive that the truck driver took over when getting off the highway for rest stops and breaks, otherwise, he said the journey was completed autonomously.[..]
- mattrp 7y agoI’ve driven this route before. What’s remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is. The only thing could be a possible risk would be a snowstorm in Colorado. Otherwise the route is basically one long boring ride. Maybe the Las Vegas 95-15 intersection presents a challenge? St Louis and Kansas City have some transitions. Everywhere else - Mojave, Utah, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, PA is all relatively straight, without obstacles and rural. Even the 78 to 309 transition to Quakertown is a fairly pedestrian two lane merge. I guess my point is if you’re gonna do a 3000 mile butter run, it could get any easier. Personally I would have hired a 78 Trans Am and shipped a container’s worth of Coors.
- wavefunction 7y agoThere's no dairy farms in Pennsylvania huh?
- seriesf 7y agoExactly. Imagine believing you have accomplished something by hauling butter 3000 miles to Pennsylvania.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoYour comment and the parent's are snarky and ungenerous. The accomplishment is the self-driving truck crossing 3k miles, not the butter contained within.
- seriesf 7y agoActually the butter is the important thing in this article. The self-driving revolution isn't going to enable beautiful and wondrous accomplishments. Instead, it's going to enable international megaconglomerates to more cheaply exploit the desperately poor migrant workforces of far-away places. That's all you're going to get out if it: butter at the same price, but from Tulare County and the butter company saves ten cents per ton by cutting out the trucker.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoI have trouble believing you actually think that. I suspect you are just trying to defend a comment that's indefensibly vapid. But, if you genuinely believe there's no positive value in freight and that making it more efficient is an unworthy goal, then I don't think we'll come eye to eye on anything tonight.
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoWhy isn’t this a great accomplishment? People don’t have to be long haul truck drivers or be alert the whole time.. Even if it entirely eliminates human beings, it means the person who’d be driving the truck will be able to do better paying or other fulfilling tasks. Who knows...study or become an artist or spend more time with children etc. I also don’t see how migrant workers are being exploited? How is anyone exploited if they are not driving long haul truck routes?
- jelliclesfarm 7y agohttps://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck-completes-coast-to-coast-delivery-in-3-days/568729/ https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck... : Level 4 autonomy. more details here [..] The company has run smaller-scale pilots across the U.S. and has operations underway in Beijing and Shanghai, China, Kerrigan said. The delivery for Land O' Lakes is the first where Plus.ai has been able to disclose companies involved. Kerrigan said he was unable to confirm whether Plus.ai would run similar deliveries for Land O' Lakes. He said the trip allowed Plus.ai to collect data on driving conditions, including rain and snow, which is crucial to ensuring the technology is safe for mainstream use. TuSimple, another autonomous trucking company, is planning to run fully autonomous commercial freight deliveries in 2021. The company's trucks also run at L4 autonomy, and completed pilots delivering cargo for UPS and the U.S. Postal Service in Arizona this year. Amazon, Google and other major companies have explored using autonomous trucks to speed up delivery times, address the driver shortage, or potentially phase out drivers.[..]
- melling 7y ago“the truck drove mostly autonomously.” That last 10% is going to be a lot of work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule
- hprotagonist 7y agoit's worse than that, of course. You'll find, like a certain Greek philosopher fond of asking annoying questions, that the first 90% of the last 10% will be OK, and that last 10% will be the other 90% of the ... etc. etc. etc.
- ianai 7y agoThat’s still a hell of a savings.
- angry-sw-dev 7y agoIn 1995 having a domestic phone call, placed on a wired line, drop due to line issues was effectively inconceivable -- it simply would never happen. In 2015 we were in a time when it happened all the time, people simply accepted that voip was often unreliable. In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare. I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.
- rightbyte 7y agoTrue ... I kind of forgot how reliable analogue tone switching were. Someone cut of the wire once in the road. It's like I see more and more cars stuck at the roadside. Atleast in the 90s the drove until they started to smoke.
- scarejunba 7y agoIs that actually true? My parents had phones around then and they've always had this habit where they say "Hello! HELLO!" At the shortest momentary pause in the conversation.
- uptown 7y agoWhere did they parkay when they got there?
- hirundo 7y agoFor the initial truly driverless test, mount a nice comfortable seat on the truck's front grill and ask the CEO to sit there for this same trip. If he's confident enough to be the crumple zone, that's something. Maybe the same should go for the larger shareholders and the lead engineers. The rest of us will have skin in the game whether we want to or not. They should have more.
- peterwwillis 7y agoThey were delivering butter... to Pennsylvania? TIL: California is the nation's leading milk producer, New York is fourth, Pennsylvania is 7th.
- catalogia 7y agoYeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.
- aggie 7y agoIt's a good argument for a carbon tax.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- berbec 7y agoOne can not forget the genius product that is Fiji Water[1]. Thinking about what happened to get that bottle into the fridge of my bodega makes me shudder. 1: https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html "IS FIJI WATER FROM FIJI? One hundred percent of FIJI Water is from a single source in the pristine, tropical Fiji Islands, an archipelago of over 300 islands nestled in the South Pacific, more than 1600 miles from the nearest industrialized country."
- sdan 7y agoInteresting thing is that their Silicon Valley office is next to a strip mall and is more of an office space than an industrial one. I live near there and so far haven't seen any of their branded trucks or anything of their brand really relative to other self driving startups like Apple roaming around with their mattress-like hardware system. So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like several other Chinese based self-driving companies.
- Tempest1981 7y agoTheir webpage shows 15 engineering job openings in Silicon Valley: https://plus.ai/join/ https://plus.ai/join/
- crtlaltdel 7y agoimo the open req for an auto tech is a tell that they either have a low key shop or are building a shop out in sv
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoYes. You are right R&D offices are in China. US HQ in Cupertino. It only started in 2016...so I guess most of the AI R&D already developed in China prior.
- angry-sw-dev 7y agoIt is interesting... Makes you wonder if the things they are claiming to have working, and the accomplishments, are actually true, or just smoke as they hope for a high flying payday by a cash flush competitor hoping to buy advancements.
- sys_64738 7y agoHow does a self-driving truck refill its gas tank without human intervention?
- aggie 7y agoWhy does it need to be without human intervention? A gas station attendant on major trucking routes is a pretty easy solution until some autonomous docking standard is developed.
- cellularmitosis 7y agoBy using a large enough fuel tank to eliminate fueling stops.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoBy not having one and being an electric truck instead. That will help with heavy loads as well because they have awesome torque. Just a matter of time before battery production volume enables mass retirement of Diesel fleets. Short term, there simply aren't enough batteries and plenty more lucrative things that also require batteries (like luxury tank like trucks for people who need to compensate for something). Once that market saturates, trucks are obviously going electric at a massive scale.
- mr_toad 7y ago> How does a self-driving truck refill its gas tank without human intervention? I know it’s facetious, but I couldn’t help but think of the human batteries in The Matrix when I read that question.
- Tempest1981 7y agoFor better or worse, millions of truck drivers are going to be displaced. Just like the way robots replaced manufacturing jobs. The best plan is to prepare, like Yang and others are saying: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking-czar/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking-czar/ So we can soften the blow.
- internet_user 7y agoYang is acceleration.
- dmos62 7y agoBe careful to balance your yang with yin.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- duelingjello 7y agoWe need to create lots of jobs in other industries that allow living wages without a college degree. The government should massively incentivize: - solar farms - wind turbines - battery storage deployments - residential solar w/ batteries and grid-down operation (most grid-tied virtual battery solar stops working completely in a power outage) - achieve fusion power net output - elderly and disabled caregivers - offer an option to teach and mentor people the fundamentals of running a successful small business (expanding SBA/SCORE) - give people a chance to showcase, see and try out different industries - setup a factory incubator to allow bootstrapping and designing efficient, streamlined operations for quality products made in the US at globally-competitive prices. Investing in people and infrastructure brings lots of indirect returns. Do everything possible to help people to succeed and have a future.
- thecleaner 7y agoYeah but what about oil companies ? You know, the people who care the most about humanity.
- Tempest1981 7y agoPBS recently had a good show about the AI revolution, saying it's similar to the industrial revolution. They show Embark AI/trucking in SF, and interview an unsuspecting truck driver: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-investigates-the-promise-and-perils-of-artificial-intelligence-in-a-two-hour-special/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-in... Excerpt about tearing society apart: "I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so,” says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. “AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart,” Kai-Fu Lee warns, “because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole." It also mentions China's heavy investment in AI.
- louis_pasteur 7y agoSooner or later, drones will start plying across aerial routes too for transportation of goods. That will be perhaps both cheaper for ebay/amazon and also leave the roads free for people to walk. What do you think?
- CraneWorm 7y agoIsn't flying stuff more expensive than driving it around?
- cellularmitosis 7y agoPorque no los dos? As the truck drives down the street, the drones deploy out of the top...
- jillesvangurp 7y agoDepends. Uf you have solar panels, the electricity is more or less free after you buy and deploy them. So if you have some drone fleet and solar panels + batteries, the only real cost you have is basically maintenance. The way many businesses work, variable cost is what matters. So you'd lease the drones, the solar panels & batteries (or just get a cheap energy supplier) and focus on handling and transporting packages. Drones are interesting for that because you can save time by flying point to point, and cost by not having to employ drivers/pilots.
- lm28469 7y ago> also leave the roads free for people to walk. I don't think the kind of truck they're aiming to automatise ever enter cities. What kind of drones and what kind of goods are you talking about ? Let's say you want to transport 40T of potatoes over 2k miles, how would that work ? Drones are good for the last few miles of the delivery (for small consumer goods), and even then there are tons of issues to fix before they'll be viable. https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industry_Data.aspx https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust... > 11.49 billion tons of freight (primary shipments only) transported by trucks in 2018, representing 71.4% of total domestic tonnage shipped.
- scurvy 7y agoOut of curiosity, how do they handle the transmissions in self-driving trucks? My guess was automatics, but torque converter automatics aren't strong enough for use in a big-rig like this. DSG? Fully "automatic" clutch-based manuals? These things have to be pretty expensive.
- anticensor 7y agoSeries hybrid aka diesel-electric may work.
- loeg 7y agoWith a diesel you can pretty much drop it into the appropriate adjacent gear and let the synchros handle it. The RPM band is pretty narrow.
- rightbyte 7y agoEuropean heavy trucks are automatic. It's a robot pulling the gearstick and pushing the clutch under the hood. I guess some US brands offer it too? Even though I know manual is popular in the US. It's kinda funny how the automatic is so popular for cars in the US but not for trucks while in Europe it is the opposite and trucks are automatic and uptil recently cars were manual mostly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joshuahaglund 7y agoThey've got electronically controlled clutches, no torque converter. Yeah, probably more expensive than a manual but they save gas which will cost much more long term. https://www.ttnews.com/articles/manual-transmissions-rapidly-becoming-thing-past https://www.ttnews.com/articles/manual-transmissions-rapidly...
- jillesvangurp 7y agoWhen trucks go electric, they'll be a lot easier to control. Current trucks are optimized for truck drivers. They become a lot simpler if you no longer need to worry about transporting humans. IMHO autonomous ICE vehicles on the road will probably not happen because they are getting replaced with cheaper EVs in roughly the same time frame that autonomous driving is happening and not having to worry about complex engines simplifies the job of automating things.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- duelingjello 7y agoSure, it proved it can do an autonomous truck Cannonball run, but why not produce and use locally? Not as some hippy-dippy thing, but it seems like a waste of petroleum to truck products clear across the entire country when there's enough land and resources to make the same or similar products nearer to the points of consumption. Common. sense.
- freddie_mercury 7y agoIt isn't like we never tried your idea. That's exactly how it worked for decades & centuries and then the world discovered shipping stuff from far away works better.
- duelingjello 7y agoYes, obviously about the past. .. and it also worked. You say "better" but you don't give any evidence to support your claim other than it's implicitly the status quo. Furthermore, shipping things halfway around the world is killing us in terms of carbon emissions. Hyperlocal manufacturing + regional manufacturing is inevitable because we cannot afford to keep that near vertical CO2 graph going up another 100 ppm. Also, corporate giant agribusinesses with their pesticide residues and crop monocultures will likely lead us into illnesses and famines from "unexpected" crop failures by putting all their "eggs" into one clone crop "basket" and one region "basket."
- t-h-e-chief 7y agoWhat is my purpose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs
- cellularmitosis 7y agoMy favorite variation on this meme is where the robot is labeled “clisp” (a less popular Lisp implementation) and its purpose is “to bootstrap sbcl” (a popular Lisp implementation)
- Animats 7y agoIs this really doing more than lane keeping and anti-rear-ending? It's hard to tell.
- sneak 7y agoI rather wish we could use trains more.
- sidcool 7y agoHow much would it usually take? And didn't the hands-off driver and safety engineer need breaks?
- robomartin 7y agoSorry to pour cold butter on this... This is not at all what we want. We need to build an automated electric high speed cargo rail system connecting the coasts and major ports. The system has to have the ability for individual container units to be routed independently. Nothing would compare to moving cargo at 300 mph or more on an efficient rail system. We need trucking to be local or short range and eliminate individual trucks for long range delivery.
- bagacrap 7y agoNothing except moving the cargo at 50 or 100mph. A shipping container moving 300mph at ground level is going to encounter some insane wind resistance even if you do attach fairings.
- robomartin 7y agoSeriously? Look up TGV and imagine the cars have containers inside. Not that difficult. Far more efficient than trucks. And then there’s Hyperloop.
- mempko 7y agoAmazing! Though, you have to wonder, would it be better if people just got their butter from local producers... This, of course, goes with any sort of food. Seems trucking has helped centralize farming which, from a risk perspective, is not a good thing.
- Tempest1981 7y agoHere is the PBS AI segment showing Embark's technology in action: https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2019/11/06/pbs-frontline-surveys-a-future-with-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2019/11/06/pbs-front...
- JohnClark1337 7y agoI could be wrong but I think a good initial phase would be to have some kind of station at the edge of cities where human drivers can jump in and take over for navigating within cities for pickup and dropoff, and then getting out and letting the AI drive the long-haul.