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This Year, Autonomous Trucks Will Take to the Road with No One on Board
- onion2k 6y agoIf I block a road an autonomous truck is expecting to drive along, will it automatically reroute to another road? If it does, then these trucks are going to be very easy to rob simply by corralling them in to a quiet location..
- dwh452 6y agoNext year autonomous consumers with No One at home
- ryderdini 6y agoThe trucks are connected to the internet, with exact location data and cameras all over--so the police would be notified very quickly at least.
- gameswithgo 6y agosir, how may one invest in your criminal enterprises?
- onion2k 6y agoI accept Bitcoin.
- konjin 6y agoI see, and for my due diligence, do you plan on stealing from your investors?
- Ericson2314 6y agoBitcoin
- mc32 6y agoThat would probably happen if you had armored autonomous Brinks CIT trucks driving around. But just as likely they’d have thought of this scenario and prepared for it.
- intended 6y agoNo one prepares for what motivated attackers think of. These trucks will be robbed. I look forward to LIDAR invisible, reflective cars in the next fast and furious installment.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoThey'll just insure it and be done with, like they currently do with regular trucks (which BTW have to stop every 9 hours and let the driver sleep, thus creating a very vulnerable situation wherre the truck is parked and driver is helpless). Truck robberies are just not a big problem already.
- mc32 6y agoI think truck stops and middle of nowhere are different though. Truck stops have other truckers. Some have facilities and cameras. But yeah, I think most truck jackings are targeted and often involve insiders, or occasionally a driver leaves the truck unsecured and someone drives off but that’s rare.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoGranted, I am no truck driver myself, but from my vast experience hitchhiking in the EU and former USSR and hearing stories from drivers, robberies or theft of cargo happen quite often at truck stops along the roads, most of which lack cameras or even much lighting. Other trucks may be present, but their drivers are usually sleeping and wouldn't intervene anyway, because who wants to risk their life for a stranger when all cargo is insured anyway?
- maxerickson 6y agoDepot to depot, you are going to have to block major highways to get them to divert anywhere near a quiet location. And if it is even sort of a problem, companies shipping valuable stuff aren't just going to do nothing about it.
- TameAntelope 6y agoBut you're still robbing a truck...
- jpitz 6y agoIf it is unoccupied it is burglary, right? A less risky crime, both in the face of opposition by a potentially armed driver, and the potential criminal justice consequences.
- TigeriusKirk 6y agoNew crimes and penalties can easily be created.
- jpitz 6y agoThey could, but ultimately, this is not a violent crime. How does it benefit the greater good to treat this a different, and I assume, more severe, crime than simple burglary of an unoccupied building?
- TigeriusKirk 6y agoOne with a large array of cameras. So the dumbest possible target. But people rob banks, where they're also 100% guaranteed to be on camera and automatically involves an FBI investigation. As well as having a surprisingly low average haul (a few thousand dollars).
- Ekaros 6y agoIs truck robbery at gun point a huge problem currently? Already robbing trucks is pretty simple afaire, but there doesn't seem to be huge boom going on...
- pydry 6y agoIt's a bit more difficult with a person on board.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoBut not really. The person never makes a fuss (nor can realistically do so), and netiher does want to make a fuss for a simple job for one company, driving cargo owned by another company, with overall operation insured by a third company that's just going to reimburse everyone.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoKey assumption: the perpetrator is willing to leave the driver alive.
- bluGill 6y agoThey typically are. Murder tends to get a higher level of police attention. My understanding is the most common thing to do is take the trailer when the truck is parked and the driver is away.
- cooljacob204 6y agoBut it is, they would need to use violence to compel them. That greatly increases the risk of them getting shot (Many truck drivers carry guns) and it goes from larceny to robbery which greatly increases the criminal penalty.
- BurningFrog 6y agoDon't a lot of truck drivers own their trucks? Anyway, the human is a witness which adds problems. He's also a potential murder victim, which drives up the potential legal consequences by a lot. I don't have much real world experience with heist execution, so take my speculation for what it is.
- burkaman 6y agoWhy don't you do that today? Do you expect a human truck driver to defend the cargo with a shotgun or something?
- analog31 6y agoThey could just hire all of the former drivers as guards. Not just against highway robbers, but even merely Luddites, pranksters, and protestors.
- lookdangerous 6y agoI wonder how an autonomous truck responds when a tire blows
- peteradio 6y agoStandard response is to explode the entire truck in place on the highway. You can upgrade for a nominal fee which will cause truck to pull to the next available side of the road in case of tire failure.
- BurningFrog 6y agoProbably calls for a repair guy like I would do?
- Taylor_OD 6y agoI wonder if they would respond better or worse than a human. Do tires blow often on large trucks? If not a trained system could have more fed data on what to do in that situation than a human who has never or rarely experienced it.
- Retric 6y agoPresumably the same thing human trucks do and keep driving. 7/8 is within the safety margin and 2 blowouts on the same trip is extremely rare. That’s the reason for a dual tire setup as it’s designed for this kind of redundancy.
- jessaustin 6y agoThat is not the policy of drivers who wish to retain their CDL. Gradually disintegrating radials are a hazard to everyone on the road. It isn't as though blowouts are uncorrelated, anyway.
- Retric 6y agoThat’s the joke. The obvious choice for the AI is to slow down without applying full breaking power, find the nearest safe spot to pull over, and then call for assistance. But, boring yet practical solutions are hardly worth discussing.
- blakesterz 6y ago"This year"... kinda... This year there will be the first real tests run with no one in the cab. "By 2024,TuSimple plans to achieve Level 4 autonomy, meaning that its trucks will be able to operate without a human driver under limited conditions that may include time of day, weather, or premapped routes." Somehow I've managed to miss that trucks are better for this stuff not just because of the type of driving they do, but also because they're trucks! Being bigger gives them some advantages. "Trucks are also a better platform for autonomy, with their large size providing more power for computers and an improved field of view for sensors, which can be mounted higher off the ground."
- pplante 6y agoThis is true, but the size of the vehicle is probably correlated to the scale of any failure modes.
- GarrisonPrime 6y agoPeople also tend to give trucks a wider berth, or at least notice you more and respond more readily to your actions. I’ve only ever owned small cars, and in the handful of times I’ve needed to drive a U-haul truck or similar the trip started with trepidation. But I quickly discovered that other drivers have a strong tendency (self-interested, of course) to help big trucks out.
- joehartshorn 6y ago>"Trucks are also a better platform for autonomy, with their large size providing more power for computers" I'm no expert but "power for computers" doesnt strike me as a bottleneck, Geohot/Comma seem to be doing fine, this just sounds like marketing bs
- ljlolel 6y agoThat's right the limitation is Data. You can't effectively use the extra compute if you don't have enough data to train a bigger neural network. https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-awful-until-its-perfect-8fb0b0764ef8 https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-aw...
- jariel 6y agoI cannot believe that this isn't the foundation of autonomous driving: long hauls, highways, no stop signs, semi-controlled circumstances. The economics are more clear and industrialized. Even if a driver had to be present when they got off the highway, I think 'long haul' should be naturally the first thing to be tackled. And I'm surprised Walmart isn't leading the way, they should be.
- StreamBright 6y agoThere is one minor detail to add: the truck weight and speed makes it much more dangerous than a simple passenger car. The first couple of lawsuits when these statistical engines do some real damage will be brutal.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoIt already is; autonomous vehicles active now are e.g. airport light rails. Short hauls, fixed track and schedules, very controlled environments so not even a need for e.g. lidar or smart cameras or anything. Distance sensors to kick in in case of unexpected obstacles maybe.
- sseagull 6y agoBut even semi-controlled isn't fully controlled. I've always wondered about what happens when the system really gets off the 'happy path'. Maybe there's an accident, and police are directing traffic? Does the truck understand hand gestures (which aren't necessarily standardized)? Or maybe the police aren't there yet, damaged cars are blocking the road, and the truck may need to get out of the way for emergency services to arrive (possibly requiring going a little off road). These happen less on highways, but they still certainly happen, and not having a human in the loop can make things dramatically worse. Do they have to stop at weigh stations? Do they understand the signage? I suppose most would have the system where you don't have to stop, but I don't know if all weigh stations support that. There are lots of instances you can imagine that don't require driving skills, but actually require a general intelligence with knowledge of the world around them. (I suppose you can have a command center where someone can take control or give commands to the truck. Sounds tricky but possible).
- HenryKissinger 6y agoThere are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. What are 3.5 million people going to do if they're suddenly out of a job and have to change career completely? I am far from being a Trump supporter, but it would be easy for authoritarian politicians to ride to the White House on the grievances of millions of voters who had their livelihoods taken away from them by automation. Trump's promises to bring back manufacturing jobs were fueled by the automation and outsourcing that have already eliminated millions of positions. So Trump's victory in 2016 was already due in part to a backlash against automation. No society where an average person - of average intelligence, average skills, average potential - cannot make a good living for themselves, can survive as a civilized society. We can't all be developers, engineers, or doctors.
- oldgradstudent 6y agoFor that to happen, you actually need working autonomous trucks. Sadly, press releases, PowerPoint decks, heavily edited videos on YouTube, and even artificial demos in tightly controlled environments are not enough.
- onion2k 6y agoWhat are 3.5 million people going to do if they're suddenly out of a job and have to change career completely? There's a precedent for this. Back in the early part of the 20th century the number of people working in the horse trade fell dramatically as horses were replaced with automobiles. Society survived.
- Ma8ee 6y agoMy grandfather grew up in an orphanage and was later sent to train to become a wheel maker, that is, someone who makes large wooden wheels with spokes for horse carriages. This must have been around 1925. Luckily for him, the skills he learned were quite easily transferred to general carpentry and cabinet making.
- InitialLastName 6y agoSure, society survived, but the decades after the industrial revolution/jobs realignment were wracked by insurgency, terrorism, the rise of the communist, fascist and anarchist movements, and culminated in two ridiculously destructive wars and a catastrophic depression. I'm not saying those things will happen now too (we would never see extremist violence in this day and age, would we?) but given that history tells us that when large numbers of young-middle aged men are underemployed, you get violence, crime, and deaths of despair, perhaps we would be wise to spend some time thinking through how to help those people reestablish their connections to society.
- mef 6y agoSeems like yet another press release from an autonomous driving company that promises to test without humans soon and has vague ambitions of level 4 autonomy in the 3-5 year horizon. Add it to the pile! http://rodneybrooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SelfDriving20210101.png http://rodneybrooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SelfDrivi... (from recent HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436)
- ljlolel 6y agoif any of them actually get on the road, then they would be endangering lives https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-passenger-lives-3ee2d0e55f5f https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...
- narcissismo 6y agoExpect delays in Somerset due to a multiple lorry pileup. The leading lorry shut down when recent earthworks caused an unexpected input. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-55571080 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-55571080
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- btbuildem 6y agoCan they handle winter yet?
- acvny 6y agowill the regulators allow this kind of tests on public roads?
- m3at 6y agoOver the last five years prominent self-driving companies have consistently over promised and under-delivered. I was quite optimistic for the approach that Starsky chose (but unfortunately couldn't bring to market [1]) with autonomous segments combined with occasional remote assistance. It might not be as sexy as FSD but that's tech we can use now. That said, if this team can make it work, power to them! Edit: I realize this might sound dismissive. I worked on perception tasks for autonomous driving, and believe FSD can be done. I just don't feel that it's a year away, but I'd love to be wrong! [1] https://www.therobotreport.com/starsky-robotics-co-founder-on-self-driving-truck-shutdown/ https://www.therobotreport.com/starsky-robotics-co-founder-o...
- ljlolel 6y agoif any of them actually get on the road, then they would be endangering lives https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-passenger-lives-3ee2d0e55f5f https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...
- njarboe 6y agoYes. Nothing new can ever be produced that can endanger lives. And people wonder why living standards have not gone up since this idea grabbed a hold in society in the 1970's
- xnyan 6y agoWhat are some examples of risk not taken that have lead to falling living standards? My understanding of the data is that living standards have fallen because wages for most workers have been fairly stagnate since the 70s while the price things like housing and healthcare has skyrocketed.
- njarboe 6y agoNuclear power was set to decrease the cost of power by an order of magnitude. It was stopped due to perceived risks while coal was allowed to continue to be used at known high death toll of millions of people per year. You cannot legally build a nuclear reactor in a normal way. You have to design it completely and then get it approved before you build it. This costs around $500 million dollars, as NuPower has shown. If you change the design much at all you have to get it approved all over again. Thus only one new reactor design in the US has been approved for 50 years and it still has not been built yet.
- smcg 6y agoHey we have these things called TRAINS ya know
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoTo offset liability, commercial AVs will be surrounded with cameras. Idea: Self-driving goods transport End Result: Exabytes of new public surveillance data gifted to LEO and other powerful interests
- hikerclimb 6y agoHopefully they crash.
- mlac 6y agoI had the realization the other day that what I want is a self-driving truck bed. Just a truck bed. Maybe one with a cab on it to stop the weather, but 8-10ft would be enough. I could send it to get my groceries, have it follow me places if I need to take something with me, and send it to my family if they need to give me something. Rental truck beds would be even better. I could order one, have it go pick up my curbside order from Home Depot and the Grocery Store, and then drop it off at my house. Then I could send it back to the rental facility. Likewise, companies could buy them to deliver for the last mile. Is anyone working on this?