11 ms·

Waymo and Daimler Trucks partner on the development of fully autonomous trucks

142 points by recov 6y ago

treis 6y ago
I still can't quite figure out why exit to exit trucks weren't the first problem to tackle. The economic case is clear and it seems like highway driving should be a simpler problem than city. Even moreso since you can run the trucks at night when there is much less traffic.
- majestik 6y ago
  Because trucks are more dangerous than cars.
  - melling 6y ago
    That makes them a bigger win to automate. You save a lot of money on accidents too by automating.
- nickik 6y ago
  That basically what Tesla is doing, unlike Daimler they just don't have the Trucks yet. Once the truck is out it will drive itself on the highway. The problem is just that you still need a driver anyway, so it really doesn't help that much for now. Its the same problem Waymo has in general.
  - netsharc 6y ago
    Well, the driver would just drive the "first" and "last" mile right? So he could drive the truck to a lot next to the highway that has an on-ramp, let that truck go on its way, and he can jump into a truck that just drove itself off the highway onto that same lot... Or I guess you mean they still need a driver because of compliance/legal issues?
    - nickik 6y ago
      Well for now you need it for logal reasons of course. What you suggest is an interesting idea, a total change on how we think about truck logistics. Its certainty possible but I don't know if we will ever get there. By the time the legal things are sorted out, the trucks might just drive themselves all the way to the destination.
  - gmadsen 6y ago
    Not sure why this opinion is so prevalent. Tesla is in no way close or comparable to a L4 system. It is not even a brief thought for waymo
    - ra7 6y ago
      Just hype I’d guess. Tesla fans love to equate it’s self driving efforts with Waymo’s, when in reality they are years behind even with the new FSD update.
    - nickik 6y ago
      Neither has Waymo or Daimler ever demonstrated such a system with a truck on a highway. My point was about strategy. And who will win general driving is yet open, and just assuming it Waymo is foolish. I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world. They have trucks that will have this same feature and they have already talked about the idea of platooning. Just downvoting me because you don't think Tesla approach is as good as Waymo/Daimler approach doesn't make what I said wrong.
      - ra7 6y ago
        > I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world. That's just advanced driver assistance, nowhere near "full self driving". Granted, it's better than other cars, but it's still not self driving. Also, "almost without intervention" has no meaning if you have to keep your hand at the wheel at all times ready to takeover.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Opportunity cost, perhaps? Trucks are an easy win if you've got launchable performance in cities, but still require a lot of human energy to get into production. So early on, when the number of people that know the system is small, it seems better to work on the bigger, more general problem, and branch out to the sub problem later on when there's more people to work on it. From another perspective, of you stop work on cities to finish a trucks launch, you're losing ground to competitors working on cities, which may be decisive in the research phase.
- vsskanth 6y ago
  This is something I've wondered about too. If I were to guess, these might be potential roadblocks (no pun intended): - Insurance, since you're transporting others stuff at highway speeds - You still need a CDL driver right now (not cheap) - Economics - the failure of Starsky Robotics might offer some clues here - Interstate Regulations on Driverless testing (?)
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Presumably the economic incentives are much greater for trucking than for consumers (as is typically the case). If we can accept that, then investors shouldn't be swayed by regulatory questions (regulations change easily when wealthy investors and corporations want them to change) nor by some marginal upfront insurance cost (the hypothesis is that driverless trucks will be much less fallible and thus insurance costs will go down quickly as driverless tech proves itself). The interestion questions are "is the 'greater economic incentive for trucking' assumption correct in the first place" and if so, why were we still bothering with consumer automotive in the first place?
    - leakybit 6y ago
      > (regulations change easily when wealthy investors and corporations want them to change) Teamsters would say otherwise.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I don't think they would, and that there are other interest groups doesn't suggest that corporate interests aren't particularly powerful. IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it. That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range. (And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.)
- briffle 6y ago
  My thought too. Think between Amazon (or UPS/Fedex/Walmart) distribution centers/warehouses. Still have a driver do the last mile, for deliveries to stores, homes, etc, but the between cities, long haul routes seem ripe for automation. (especially with all the laws on driver mandatory rest periods).
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    With 5G, considering last miles are almost always populated, you could even have remote drivers take over.
- ilyas121 6y ago
  Might be something as simple as the average engineer/maker/hacker has access to a car to play with but not a truck.
- notatoad 6y ago
  I think self-driving cars are a PR problem as much as they are a technology one, and that's definitely something waymo is working on - remember their cute little round bubble car? Trucks are big, heavy, and human-driven ones already scare enough people on the road. If you launch with trucks first, you risk a backlash from people who are afraid of them. If you start with an autonomous taxi service people can sit in the cars themselves, feel safe, see that there's a "safety driver" present, and even if they aren't in the vehicle they still get to interact with them on the roads. you can make people comfortable with the idea before you launch the trucks. and everything that goes into the self-driving taxis is still valuable development work for the trucks. I wouldn't be surprised if self-driving trucks actually are the first real commercial launch target for waymo, and the taxi thing is just PR.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy. If there is a use case where a driver-less truck is slightly cheaper for equivalent results (or a lot cheaper for lesser results) they will get bought. The competition in OTR trucking is brutal like that. If the quarterly or annual operational cost comes out to be a tenth of a cent per mile lower than a dry van operated by a conventional steering wheel holder you can bet Swift, Schneider, Walmart, and anyone else with thousands of trucks will buy then for a portion of their fleets. They kind of have to to hedge their bets at that point.
    - notatoad 6y ago
      >Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy as long as the regulatory situation allows it, yes. but until they're seeking approval to have them actually allowed on the roads, making people feel warm and fuzzy is pretty important.
- maiybe 6y ago
  Most of the responses to your comment are a bit off here. The challenge of autonomous trucks isn't that they're "more dangerous," it's a matter of physics and current LIDAR technology. The weight of the truck means there is a minimal safe stopping distance at a given speed. Frankly, the quality and distance of current LIDAR tech falls short of the distance required for safe stopping at the average highway speed for a truck. Put another way, the autonomous driving stack has difficulty seeing far enough ahead of a truck to successfully stop in time to not cause an accident in highway environments. You'll need better fusion of perception stack (LIDAR + imaging + neural nets) or better LIDAR ranges to be able to deploy autonomous trucking sooner.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Radars already go 100m+.To avoid a front collision pretty much all these systems use radar, not lidar. Next generation radars are already doing 300m+.
    - jeffreygoesto 6y ago
      But angular resolution still is too low to disambiguate targets in the far field and neither frequencies nor maturity for imaging radar are here yet. Range alone does not solve the main radar problem.
  - treis 6y ago
    That doesn't sound plausible. Breaking distance goes up with the square of speed while it only increases linearly with weight. As an example, a truck going 55 can stop as fast as a car going 65. Ultimately it just means your self driving car has to drive a bit slower.
  - choppaface 6y ago
    Agree with the lidar range issue, but in a perfect storm... there was also major hype to drive money into robotaxis, e.g. Uber flashing an order for $10 billion of Mercedes S-Class ( https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-orders-100000-mercedes-benz-s-class-sedans-report/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-or... ). This year we've seen Luminar start to go public via SPAC, and their high-range Lidar has been mounted on most (all?) non-Waymo self-driving truck prototypes. There's even a public dataset with Luminar data now: https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD
- josefresco 6y ago
  Road work is typically scheduled during the night in at least my region of the US (Northeast). If you think normal roads are confusing for auto-pilot, wait until they try to navigate hastily setup detours for temporary construction.
kuroguro 6y ago
Oddly I'd trust Google more with a self-driving car than say Uber or Tesla. Kind of glad they're making progress and expanding. The industry as a whole seems reckless to me tho.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I don't know, with Google I see two scenarios that are difficult: "this product has been discontinued" while you're relying on the car, and some random Youtube moderation algorithm getting triggered by a comment you wrote eight years ago and blocking your account, leaving you stranded outside your car.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    Realistically it won't be discontinued (if it works well), realistically you can expect to see unskippable ads in your car one day (unless you sign-up to a youtube-google-music-premium-red subscription).
    - istorical 6y ago
      It would be rolled into a new product line and you'd need to start paying a higher monthly service fee and take it to a dealer to have it repainted with new logo, have a new control panel with all new UX installed in the dash, and the self driving cars product would be merged with the self-driving motorcycles product and when you got your car back from the dealer you'd find it now had 3 wheels instead of the 2 of a motorcycle or the 4 of a car, satisfying the needs of both previous products inadequately. And then in another 2 years they'd deprecate your car and launch a new competing self driving bus initiative.
    - rurp 6y ago
      I'm surprised I hardly ever see this brought up. If Waymo ever does become a breakout success the ride quality is almost sure to become a miserable ad ridden experience at some point; and of course, all passenger actions and intonations will be parsed and analyzed for tracking and ad targeting.
hikerclimb 6y ago
Hopefully they crash...
msoad 6y ago
is a driver still more expensive that all those equipments + the risk of "truck pirates" that might steal the whole thing on the way? Even in the U.S. truck drivers are not that expensive.
- ranieuwe 6y ago
  Drivers can’t drive 24/7. This cuts down on time to destination significantly if the truck can keep going. Perhaps this can augment the driver, where driver provides handling, gas, etc. while the truck self drives.
- tommoor 6y ago
  I'm sure a driver will still be needed for a while yet, they'll just be required to do less – much like an airplane. So the whole system becomes safer. Around 5000 people die per year in crashes involving trucks in the US alone.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    That's not a crazy high number. But I would assume there is an order of magnitude more of that in injuries. And then probably much more in property damage. So significantly reducing truck accidents could be very lucrative.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Trucks stop frequently at gas stations, rest areas, etc. without "truck pirates" making much of a dent. I'm not sure why it'd be any different in transit.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Drivers are in short supply depending on your location, and they are quite expensive. The pay along with the short supply has made keeping drivers a bit difficult in some places. Not to mention, a computer isn't going to be limited by OTR regulations concerning On-Duty and and Driving hours, and they don't have to reset.
  - 6y ago
amcoastal 6y ago
I used to work as an intern in this department at the autonomous driving company Daimler acquired. Had a lot of great experiences there, and watching the hardware and software for autonomous vehicles being developed (and contributing to it and driving it!) was eye-opening and made me to fall in love with programming and ML applications. Waymo paired up with a great team here to help develop their autonomous trucking program.
- eastendguy 6y ago
  Well, it looks more to me the "great team" at Daimler has given up, or? Will there be any ML work at Daimler going forward?
eastendguy 6y ago
This is a sad day for the European car industry. It seems everyone except (maybe?) VW has given up on competing with Tesla and Google on self-driving.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Car companies aren't tech companies, and Google isn't a car company. I don't think it would've ever worked for a car company to develop this tech, and I don't think Waymo ever plans to make its own cars. Realistically, Waymo will licensing their technology to car manufacturers.
- Devils-Avocado 6y ago
  There's a general death of innovation in Europe. Blame the high taxes, endless bureaucracy and regulation, no single language, welfare state, and mass immigration.
randompwd 6y ago
> The World’s Most Experienced Driver ™ Marketing departments just have to ruin everything.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wyxuan 6y ago
I think it's interesting they're only installing sensing tech in front of the truck, not the back.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Well the "back" is the cargo, which comes and goes. Unless they want to somehow attach and detach sensors to the cargo every time (which would be a logistic hell and also very unreliable), I'm not sure what other solutions there would be.
TomJansen 6y ago
Weird. I think this money would be better invested in better train infrastructure. But then again maybe this money is peanuts to the money needed to get better train infrastructure
foxtr0t 6y ago
As the AV space continues to mature, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that Waymo made some good choices: 1. Prioritizing safety over everything has kept regulators far away and there haven't been any mishaps that I'm aware of. 2. Using multiple high resolution sensor modalities (LIDAR, camera) has led to very accurate localization and environment understanding, evident in on board videos [1] 3. LIDAR costs continue to drop precipitously, it now seems quite possible that next gen Teslas may sneak a unit on board to improve localization and depth perception. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsfUmU30kWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsfUmU30kWY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4&t
- ilyas121 6y ago
  Can you point to examples or evidence for the third or is that just a prediciton?
  - foxtr0t 6y ago
    My own prediction based on the fact that almost all other AV programs are using LIDAR, costs are decreasing with scale /R&D, and Teslas localization looks shotty at best. As costs continue to drop, its going to be tough for the company to continue rationalize sticking with cameras only just to keep Elon's ego in tact.
    - bootlooped 6y ago
      I've always found his position here weird. In a safety critical system, I don't like hearing "we don't need x, we can get by with just y". I like redundant systems, especially when one may do better in certain conditions than the other.
    - joakleaf 6y ago
      I was actually in the "pro lidar" camp, until I saw the user uploaded youtube videos of the Tesla beta FSD released last week in action. Now I am not so sure anymore. Looking at the beta UI in the car while it is driving, I am impressed with how well it detects everything. There are examples in dark and even areas with leafs covering parts of an unmarked road. It doesn't look at all like the detection system is struggling. The only thing is, that things seem to "float" a bit, or cars and pedestrians disappears when going behind other cars and reappears again on the other side. The sides of the road also seems to float/shift a little bit from time to time. I wonder if they are not using a temporal filter of some sort (like assume a car continues in the same trajectory when goes behind another object), or if the UI only displays an "unfiltered" value. In any case, I still haven't seen examples where the cameras didn't pick up anything relevant/critical.
eloff 6y ago
George Hotz makes some good points about Waymo. At best it's a slower Uber (drives more timidly and slower) with the potential to be cheaper. So let's customers trade time for money. But uber pool already does that and accounts for about 10% of rides - in other words it's not a trade off the market demands. Then add to that it's had like ten billion dollars of investment. So it needs to turn into an uber sized company or it will be a failure. Not exactly standard Silicon Valley MVP style prove the business model, acquire customers, and then get series A investment. Even if it can solve self driving, it could still fail as a company.
- riffraff 6y ago
  > But uber pool already does that and accounts for about 10% of rides - in other words it's not a trade off the market demands. How is that the same thing? Sharing a car with someone is definitely not the same as just being slower.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  Unlike Uber, Waymo won't be forced to reclassify their drivers as employees with benefits. The more governments force the increase of employee benefits and pay, the more corporations are attracted by the allure of mechanization. It has a future.
- cyrux004 6y ago
  If they can make it a slower Uber but somehow cut costs 50%, that may be a better product market fit. Arent drivers the most expensive part of Uber ? However with those low margins, not sure how long it will take to recoup their massive engineering investment
- jbay808 6y ago
  > Not exactly standard Silicon Valley MVP style prove the business model, acquire customers, and then get series A investment. It's solving a hard problem and you don't build a Series A around an unsolved hard problem even when you know that there's market demand. That's why nobody is running a startup selling electricity below cost as an MVP for their fusion reactor back-of-a-napkin sketch. If it's just a matter of aggressive driving, I'm sure Waymo has a dial they can turn that would make them go faster, and then Uber has already proven the market for them. But they need to get the safety margins up before doing that, which is a hard problem. Is it the Silicon Valley model? Well it's not the get rich quick VC model. It's much more like the Bell Labs model of growing a transformative but immature technology in house until it's ready to deploy.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I'll believe self driving truck are around the corner when I see all the "manned" yard dogs show up for cheap on Craigslist. We can't even solve for "slowly put that trailer over there" with highly constrained environmental variables. There's no way we get commercially useful highway driving until after that.
- cmansley 6y ago
  Aren’t many ports completely autonomous? https://youtu.be/zm_rlLyelQo https://youtu.be/zm_rlLyelQo
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I was thinking distribution facilities.
specialist 6y ago
My crazy theory: Tesla vehicles are already fully autonomous. In simulation. My wild ass guess is the extra compute power is running the robot driver code. Then the human and robot actions are compared. Do some AI magic to close the gap. Any big unexplained significant deltas are forwarded to the mothership, for further analysis. This notion is why I've gone from bear to bullish on Tesla's autonomous driving. Tesla has more data than anyone else. And per Norvig, IIRC, more data is better than more compute. What little I know about Tesla comes from HN peanut gallery and Munro Live and others on YouTube. This parallel simulation idea is just what I'd do. And may explain what all that spare compute power in each car is being used for. I don't know if my wild ass guess is original or not.
hikerclimb 6y ago
Hopefully this fails...
GrimRe 6y ago
A neural network that is trained via self supervision based on Sony IMX424 rccb sensor data can achieve per pixel depth estimation with equivalent precision as even the most expensive automotive LIDAR. Not only that, having cm level localisation is wasted resolution. What good does +/- 10cm get you in terms of safety? If the object is 30cm or 0cm away the vehicle trajectory output from the driving policy should be the same either way. At low speeds where that type of resolution is useful (e.g. parking) ultrasonics provided far better ranging than LIDAR and not to mention much, much cheaper. The only defensible position of LIDAR is that when comparing a model trained using LIDAR input and one trained uses camera sensor input is that depth estimation recall is higher at .99 precision. This means that a non-LIDAR agent will sometimes detect and object that isn't really there or will estimate the depth to be closer when its in reality further away. This can be resolved with improved self supervision techniques and ultimately higher quality and more varied sensor data in the training set.

142 points by recov 6y ago

I still can't quite figure out why exit to exit trucks weren't the first problem to tackle. The economic case is clear and it seems like highway driving should be a simpler problem than city. Even moreso since you can run the trucks at night when there is much less traffic.

majestik 6y ago
Because trucks are more dangerous than cars.
- melling 6y ago
  That makes them a bigger win to automate. You save a lot of money on accidents too by automating.
nickik 6y ago
That basically what Tesla is doing, unlike Daimler they just don't have the Trucks yet. Once the truck is out it will drive itself on the highway. The problem is just that you still need a driver anyway, so it really doesn't help that much for now. Its the same problem Waymo has in general.
- netsharc 6y ago
  Well, the driver would just drive the "first" and "last" mile right? So he could drive the truck to a lot next to the highway that has an on-ramp, let that truck go on its way, and he can jump into a truck that just drove itself off the highway onto that same lot... Or I guess you mean they still need a driver because of compliance/legal issues?
  - nickik 6y ago
    Well for now you need it for logal reasons of course. What you suggest is an interesting idea, a total change on how we think about truck logistics. Its certainty possible but I don't know if we will ever get there. By the time the legal things are sorted out, the trucks might just drive themselves all the way to the destination.
- gmadsen 6y ago
  Not sure why this opinion is so prevalent. Tesla is in no way close or comparable to a L4 system. It is not even a brief thought for waymo
  - ra7 6y ago
    Just hype I’d guess. Tesla fans love to equate it’s self driving efforts with Waymo’s, when in reality they are years behind even with the new FSD update.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Neither has Waymo or Daimler ever demonstrated such a system with a truck on a highway. My point was about strategy. And who will win general driving is yet open, and just assuming it Waymo is foolish. I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world. They have trucks that will have this same feature and they have already talked about the idea of platooning. Just downvoting me because you don't think Tesla approach is as good as Waymo/Daimler approach doesn't make what I said wrong.
    - ra7 6y ago
      > I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world. That's just advanced driver assistance, nowhere near "full self driving". Granted, it's better than other cars, but it's still not self driving. Also, "almost without intervention" has no meaning if you have to keep your hand at the wheel at all times ready to takeover.
sdenton4 6y ago
Opportunity cost, perhaps? Trucks are an easy win if you've got launchable performance in cities, but still require a lot of human energy to get into production. So early on, when the number of people that know the system is small, it seems better to work on the bigger, more general problem, and branch out to the sub problem later on when there's more people to work on it. From another perspective, of you stop work on cities to finish a trucks launch, you're losing ground to competitors working on cities, which may be decisive in the research phase.
vsskanth 6y ago
This is something I've wondered about too. If I were to guess, these might be potential roadblocks (no pun intended): - Insurance, since you're transporting others stuff at highway speeds - You still need a CDL driver right now (not cheap) - Economics - the failure of Starsky Robotics might offer some clues here - Interstate Regulations on Driverless testing (?)
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Presumably the economic incentives are much greater for trucking than for consumers (as is typically the case). If we can accept that, then investors shouldn't be swayed by regulatory questions (regulations change easily when wealthy investors and corporations want them to change) nor by some marginal upfront insurance cost (the hypothesis is that driverless trucks will be much less fallible and thus insurance costs will go down quickly as driverless tech proves itself). The interestion questions are "is the 'greater economic incentive for trucking' assumption correct in the first place" and if so, why were we still bothering with consumer automotive in the first place?
  - leakybit 6y ago
    > (regulations change easily when wealthy investors and corporations want them to change) Teamsters would say otherwise.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I don't think they would, and that there are other interest groups doesn't suggest that corporate interests aren't particularly powerful. IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it. That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range. (And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.)
briffle 6y ago
My thought too. Think between Amazon (or UPS/Fedex/Walmart) distribution centers/warehouses. Still have a driver do the last mile, for deliveries to stores, homes, etc, but the between cities, long haul routes seem ripe for automation. (especially with all the laws on driver mandatory rest periods).
- dehrmann 6y ago
  With 5G, considering last miles are almost always populated, you could even have remote drivers take over.
ilyas121 6y ago
Might be something as simple as the average engineer/maker/hacker has access to a car to play with but not a truck.
notatoad 6y ago
I think self-driving cars are a PR problem as much as they are a technology one, and that's definitely something waymo is working on - remember their cute little round bubble car? Trucks are big, heavy, and human-driven ones already scare enough people on the road. If you launch with trucks first, you risk a backlash from people who are afraid of them. If you start with an autonomous taxi service people can sit in the cars themselves, feel safe, see that there's a "safety driver" present, and even if they aren't in the vehicle they still get to interact with them on the roads. you can make people comfortable with the idea before you launch the trucks. and everything that goes into the self-driving taxis is still valuable development work for the trucks. I wouldn't be surprised if self-driving trucks actually are the first real commercial launch target for waymo, and the taxi thing is just PR.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy. If there is a use case where a driver-less truck is slightly cheaper for equivalent results (or a lot cheaper for lesser results) they will get bought. The competition in OTR trucking is brutal like that. If the quarterly or annual operational cost comes out to be a tenth of a cent per mile lower than a dry van operated by a conventional steering wheel holder you can bet Swift, Schneider, Walmart, and anyone else with thousands of trucks will buy then for a portion of their fleets. They kind of have to to hedge their bets at that point.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    >Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy as long as the regulatory situation allows it, yes. but until they're seeking approval to have them actually allowed on the roads, making people feel warm and fuzzy is pretty important.
maiybe 6y ago
Most of the responses to your comment are a bit off here. The challenge of autonomous trucks isn't that they're "more dangerous," it's a matter of physics and current LIDAR technology. The weight of the truck means there is a minimal safe stopping distance at a given speed. Frankly, the quality and distance of current LIDAR tech falls short of the distance required for safe stopping at the average highway speed for a truck. Put another way, the autonomous driving stack has difficulty seeing far enough ahead of a truck to successfully stop in time to not cause an accident in highway environments. You'll need better fusion of perception stack (LIDAR + imaging + neural nets) or better LIDAR ranges to be able to deploy autonomous trucking sooner.
- nickik 6y ago
  Radars already go 100m+.To avoid a front collision pretty much all these systems use radar, not lidar. Next generation radars are already doing 300m+.
  - jeffreygoesto 6y ago
    But angular resolution still is too low to disambiguate targets in the far field and neither frequencies nor maturity for imaging radar are here yet. Range alone does not solve the main radar problem.
- treis 6y ago
  That doesn't sound plausible. Breaking distance goes up with the square of speed while it only increases linearly with weight. As an example, a truck going 55 can stop as fast as a car going 65. Ultimately it just means your self driving car has to drive a bit slower.
- choppaface 6y ago
  Agree with the lidar range issue, but in a perfect storm... there was also major hype to drive money into robotaxis, e.g. Uber flashing an order for $10 billion of Mercedes S-Class ( https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-orders-100000-mercedes-benz-s-class-sedans-report/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-or... ). This year we've seen Luminar start to go public via SPAC, and their high-range Lidar has been mounted on most (all?) non-Waymo self-driving truck prototypes. There's even a public dataset with Luminar data now: https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD
josefresco 6y ago
Road work is typically scheduled during the night in at least my region of the US (Northeast). If you think normal roads are confusing for auto-pilot, wait until they try to navigate hastily setup detours for temporary construction.

kuroguro 6y ago

Oddly I'd trust Google more with a self-driving car than say Uber or Tesla. Kind of glad they're making progress and expanding. The industry as a whole seems reckless to me tho.

luckylion 6y ago
I don't know, with Google I see two scenarios that are difficult: "this product has been discontinued" while you're relying on the car, and some random Youtube moderation algorithm getting triggered by a comment you wrote eight years ago and blocking your account, leaving you stranded outside your car.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Realistically it won't be discontinued (if it works well), realistically you can expect to see unskippable ads in your car one day (unless you sign-up to a youtube-google-music-premium-red subscription).
  - istorical 6y ago
    It would be rolled into a new product line and you'd need to start paying a higher monthly service fee and take it to a dealer to have it repainted with new logo, have a new control panel with all new UX installed in the dash, and the self driving cars product would be merged with the self-driving motorcycles product and when you got your car back from the dealer you'd find it now had 3 wheels instead of the 2 of a motorcycle or the 4 of a car, satisfying the needs of both previous products inadequately. And then in another 2 years they'd deprecate your car and launch a new competing self driving bus initiative.
  - rurp 6y ago
    I'm surprised I hardly ever see this brought up. If Waymo ever does become a breakout success the ride quality is almost sure to become a miserable ad ridden experience at some point; and of course, all passenger actions and intonations will be parsed and analyzed for tracking and ad targeting.

hikerclimb 6y ago

Hopefully they crash...

msoad 6y ago

is a driver still more expensive that all those equipments + the risk of "truck pirates" that might steal the whole thing on the way? Even in the U.S. truck drivers are not that expensive.

ranieuwe 6y ago
Drivers can’t drive 24/7. This cuts down on time to destination significantly if the truck can keep going. Perhaps this can augment the driver, where driver provides handling, gas, etc. while the truck self drives.
tommoor 6y ago
I'm sure a driver will still be needed for a while yet, they'll just be required to do less – much like an airplane. So the whole system becomes safer. Around 5000 people die per year in crashes involving trucks in the US alone.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  That's not a crazy high number. But I would assume there is an order of magnitude more of that in injuries. And then probably much more in property damage. So significantly reducing truck accidents could be very lucrative.
ceejayoz 6y ago
Trucks stop frequently at gas stations, rest areas, etc. without "truck pirates" making much of a dent. I'm not sure why it'd be any different in transit.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Drivers are in short supply depending on your location, and they are quite expensive. The pay along with the short supply has made keeping drivers a bit difficult in some places. Not to mention, a computer isn't going to be limited by OTR regulations concerning On-Duty and and Driving hours, and they don't have to reset.
- 6y ago

amcoastal 6y ago

I used to work as an intern in this department at the autonomous driving company Daimler acquired. Had a lot of great experiences there, and watching the hardware and software for autonomous vehicles being developed (and contributing to it and driving it!) was eye-opening and made me to fall in love with programming and ML applications. Waymo paired up with a great team here to help develop their autonomous trucking program.

eastendguy 6y ago
Well, it looks more to me the "great team" at Daimler has given up, or? Will there be any ML work at Daimler going forward?

eastendguy 6y ago

This is a sad day for the European car industry. It seems everyone except (maybe?) VW has given up on competing with Tesla and Google on self-driving.

ehsankia 6y ago
Car companies aren't tech companies, and Google isn't a car company. I don't think it would've ever worked for a car company to develop this tech, and I don't think Waymo ever plans to make its own cars. Realistically, Waymo will licensing their technology to car manufacturers.
Devils-Avocado 6y ago
There's a general death of innovation in Europe. Blame the high taxes, endless bureaucracy and regulation, no single language, welfare state, and mass immigration.

randompwd 6y ago

> The World’s Most Experienced Driver ™ Marketing departments just have to ruin everything.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

wyxuan 6y ago

I think it's interesting they're only installing sensing tech in front of the truck, not the back.

ehsankia 6y ago
Well the "back" is the cargo, which comes and goes. Unless they want to somehow attach and detach sensors to the cargo every time (which would be a logistic hell and also very unreliable), I'm not sure what other solutions there would be.

TomJansen 6y ago

Weird. I think this money would be better invested in better train infrastructure. But then again maybe this money is peanuts to the money needed to get better train infrastructure

foxtr0t 6y ago

As the AV space continues to mature, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that Waymo made some good choices: 1. Prioritizing safety over everything has kept regulators far away and there haven't been any mishaps that I'm aware of. 2. Using multiple high resolution sensor modalities (LIDAR, camera) has led to very accurate localization and environment understanding, evident in on board videos [1] 3. LIDAR costs continue to drop precipitously, it now seems quite possible that next gen Teslas may sneak a unit on board to improve localization and depth perception. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsfUmU30kWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsfUmU30kWY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZ6tJSj9T4&t

ilyas121 6y ago
Can you point to examples or evidence for the third or is that just a prediciton?
- foxtr0t 6y ago
  My own prediction based on the fact that almost all other AV programs are using LIDAR, costs are decreasing with scale /R&D, and Teslas localization looks shotty at best. As costs continue to drop, its going to be tough for the company to continue rationalize sticking with cameras only just to keep Elon's ego in tact.
  - bootlooped 6y ago
    I've always found his position here weird. In a safety critical system, I don't like hearing "we don't need x, we can get by with just y". I like redundant systems, especially when one may do better in certain conditions than the other.
  - joakleaf 6y ago
    I was actually in the "pro lidar" camp, until I saw the user uploaded youtube videos of the Tesla beta FSD released last week in action. Now I am not so sure anymore. Looking at the beta UI in the car while it is driving, I am impressed with how well it detects everything. There are examples in dark and even areas with leafs covering parts of an unmarked road. It doesn't look at all like the detection system is struggling. The only thing is, that things seem to "float" a bit, or cars and pedestrians disappears when going behind other cars and reappears again on the other side. The sides of the road also seems to float/shift a little bit from time to time. I wonder if they are not using a temporal filter of some sort (like assume a car continues in the same trajectory when goes behind another object), or if the UI only displays an "unfiltered" value. In any case, I still haven't seen examples where the cameras didn't pick up anything relevant/critical.

eloff 6y ago

George Hotz makes some good points about Waymo. At best it's a slower Uber (drives more timidly and slower) with the potential to be cheaper. So let's customers trade time for money. But uber pool already does that and accounts for about 10% of rides - in other words it's not a trade off the market demands. Then add to that it's had like ten billion dollars of investment. So it needs to turn into an uber sized company or it will be a failure. Not exactly standard Silicon Valley MVP style prove the business model, acquire customers, and then get series A investment. Even if it can solve self driving, it could still fail as a company.

riffraff 6y ago
> But uber pool already does that and accounts for about 10% of rides - in other words it's not a trade off the market demands. How is that the same thing? Sharing a car with someone is definitely not the same as just being slower.
chaostheory 6y ago
Unlike Uber, Waymo won't be forced to reclassify their drivers as employees with benefits. The more governments force the increase of employee benefits and pay, the more corporations are attracted by the allure of mechanization. It has a future.
cyrux004 6y ago
If they can make it a slower Uber but somehow cut costs 50%, that may be a better product market fit. Arent drivers the most expensive part of Uber ? However with those low margins, not sure how long it will take to recoup their massive engineering investment
jbay808 6y ago
> Not exactly standard Silicon Valley MVP style prove the business model, acquire customers, and then get series A investment. It's solving a hard problem and you don't build a Series A around an unsolved hard problem even when you know that there's market demand. That's why nobody is running a startup selling electricity below cost as an MVP for their fusion reactor back-of-a-napkin sketch. If it's just a matter of aggressive driving, I'm sure Waymo has a dial they can turn that would make them go faster, and then Uber has already proven the market for them. But they need to get the safety margins up before doing that, which is a hard problem. Is it the Silicon Valley model? Well it's not the get rich quick VC model. It's much more like the Bell Labs model of growing a transformative but immature technology in house until it's ready to deploy.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I'll believe self driving truck are around the corner when I see all the "manned" yard dogs show up for cheap on Craigslist. We can't even solve for "slowly put that trailer over there" with highly constrained environmental variables. There's no way we get commercially useful highway driving until after that.

cmansley 6y ago
Aren’t many ports completely autonomous? https://youtu.be/zm_rlLyelQo https://youtu.be/zm_rlLyelQo
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I was thinking distribution facilities.

specialist 6y ago

My crazy theory: Tesla vehicles are already fully autonomous. In simulation. My wild ass guess is the extra compute power is running the robot driver code. Then the human and robot actions are compared. Do some AI magic to close the gap. Any big unexplained significant deltas are forwarded to the mothership, for further analysis. This notion is why I've gone from bear to bullish on Tesla's autonomous driving. Tesla has more data than anyone else. And per Norvig, IIRC, more data is better than more compute. What little I know about Tesla comes from HN peanut gallery and Munro Live and others on YouTube. This parallel simulation idea is just what I'd do. And may explain what all that spare compute power in each car is being used for. I don't know if my wild ass guess is original or not.

hikerclimb 6y ago

Hopefully this fails...

GrimRe 6y ago

A neural network that is trained via self supervision based on Sony IMX424 rccb sensor data can achieve per pixel depth estimation with equivalent precision as even the most expensive automotive LIDAR. Not only that, having cm level localisation is wasted resolution. What good does +/- 10cm get you in terms of safety? If the object is 30cm or 0cm away the vehicle trajectory output from the driving policy should be the same either way. At low speeds where that type of resolution is useful (e.g. parking) ultrasonics provided far better ranging than LIDAR and not to mention much, much cheaper. The only defensible position of LIDAR is that when comparing a model trained using LIDAR input and one trained uses camera sensor input is that depth estimation recall is higher at .99 precision. This means that a non-LIDAR agent will sometimes detect and object that isn't really there or will estimate the depth to be closer when its in reality further away. This can be resolved with improved self supervision techniques and ultimately higher quality and more varied sensor data in the training set.