5 ms·

Having hauled a trailer, I'm not sure how an AI is going to deal with high wind or mountain passes. I think there is a naive understanding of long haul, but it

Having hauled a trailer, I'm not sure how an AI is going to deal with high wind or mountain passes. I think there is a naive understanding of long haul, but it is surprisingly hard to drive with a massive sail on your bed.

eloff 4y ago
Ironically those kinds of things are the things AI deals with most easily. That's all math and physics. The hard part is understanding the environment and adapting the the unexpected.
- mathgladiator 4y ago
  That is the hard part, and the high wind on mountains create interesting and unexpected scenarios. Mountains are primarily a slow-going thing, but wind bursts create insane environments which are really only felt. It's going to be a factory of edge cases for both the AI to handle directly and interpret of other vehicles.
ehnto 4y ago
There is also the off-highway challenges, you still have all the same requirements as full car automation in dense districts, except now you're in a long and wide truck managing a highly-destructive amount of tonnage. Sure the majority is on the highway, but your trailer has a destination, and your truck a depot, and it's often somewhere dense and busy. I think for full automation soon, it could only happen for specific routes and operations that have set themselves up on the highways with minimal challenges off-highway. Like grain hauling. You could have the trailers dropped off at depots by bots and taken into town by drivers, but at that point you're building infrastructure specifically for highway hauling and still using local trucks for the last mile, you may as well have built a rail network.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ovao 4y ago
  The infrastructure around both long-haul and last-mile or LTL truck transport is already a thing, so in some circumstances the game doesn’t change that much under this model. Train transport is unfortunately extraordinarily complicated in comparison. It’s a great option in some cases, but a totally non-viable option in many others.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    It's true, the other upside to the road network is that it already exists, and so private companies can use it now not after a long period of lobbying to get rail introduced when it does make sense.
- gscott 4y ago
  It would make more sense to put rfid tags into those rubber reflectors and put those on the freeways and have trucks follow those then do all of the work for full self driving, cheaper too. A human driver can take over for the last mile. The truck would read the rfid tags and each would have a database entry of the gps of each tag.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    You still need full self driving I think. Car cuts you off, tire flat where and when does it pull off? Load gets unbalanced, wind shear throws you off line, road ragers, unexpected hazards, unmarked construction zones, weather and road condition changes.. you get it. I think the remote driver is going to be too slow to respond in the majority of cases where circumstances are unexpected. What about load too, not having enough drivers to respond to incidents at peak wouldn't really be acceptable. I think it's useful to note that we haven't even fully automated trains yet, which should show that even when most variables are accounted for you still need a robust detection and decision engine at the helm.
- matt_heimer 4y ago
  If low latency, high bandwidth satellite internet becomes common couldn't there be a remote pool of drivers that monitor and take over when needed?
  - v-erne 4y ago
    That's very interesting way of looking at it - we do not need to fully automate cars to put millions people out of work. If we just create automated assistants (similar to plane autopilots) that takes care of 80% of work we can then create remote driving centers for people (drone pilots) that take over when thinks go wrong. Add some specialized road patrols to handle the on ground problems (changing tires) and driving truck as a job will go from one of the most popular jobs to an outlier.
    - d1sxeyes 4y ago
      Love the idea, but this sounds exceptionally difficult to legislate for and regulate properly. Who is liable in case the remote operator makes a mistake? What if the remote operator does not make a mistake, but the connection is not stable? Do the remote operators need full HGV licences? Could they be outsourced to a third party? A third party in another country?
      - v-erne 4y ago
        And what happens when air traffic controller make mistake? Or the terminal malfunctions? This somehow did not limit air travel boom. Those are really minor problems when there are thrillions to be made.
        d1sxeyes 4y ago
        > And what happens when air traffic controller make mistake Then the human pilots in control of the aeroplanes try not to crash into each other.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    You don't even need satellite internet... Realistically power might be biggest issue. Otherwise you can just bury some fiber next or under the road and then use terrestrial solutions. Probably with decent beam forming directionally over the road you don't even need that many base stations.
- bonestamp2 4y ago
  Maybe they should just automate the long sectors and then a human jumps in the cab to drive the truck for the last few complicated miles. The humans would probably prefer that too (for the most part) since they could go home every night.
  - behringer 4y ago
    That's exactly what will happen but who's going to pay a trucker 95k a year to park trucks 8 hours a day 5 days a week?
    - IMTDb 4y ago
      Walmart, apparently. They'll employ less truckers than now since each one will be able to handle more trucks, but they'll need some.
      - behringer 4y ago
        Last mile delivery looks to be about half that, around 50k/year.
    - bonestamp2 4y ago
      If everything else was in place for this to work, I don't think you'd have to pay someone $95k to do it. To me, the $95k pay rate has a lot to do with the time on the road and away from home. Walmart might have to pay $95k for that now, but as autonomous driving takes on some of those miles, the human pay will likely go down (adjusted for inflation).
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    If they have to share roads with other drivers or the roads are unprotected from the elements, people, animals, debris, etc, you'd still need human-level intelligence to prevent harm or catastrophic loss.
markdown 4y ago
Airliners have been dealing with high winds for decades. > I'm not sure how an AI is going to deal with high wind or mountain passes. Better than humans, probably.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Airliners have it easier though. Hitting a weird wind pocket means a plane might drop 50 feet and everyone on board jolts awake and drinks spill. In a truck that’s a catastrophic crash. And no planes have zero pilots to take over..
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    My car's traction-control reacts faster than any human; often the dash light is the only indication I have that the car had lost traction for a fraction of a second and corrected for it. I don't see how automated systems would struggle with "sudden" wind changes that take humans half a second or more to react (which is eons for computers at modern clock speeds).
- steve76 4y ago
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I expect it will be much like harbor pilots pulling ships into crowded ports: the tricky stuff will be handled by highly skilled humans, the easy stuff (long highway miles through cornfields ok flyover states) by AIs. There will be a few exhaustively mapped and highly trafficked main routes where the truckers will carefully pull out of a warehouse and drive to the onramp, get out, and take a shuttle back to the warehouse. The truck will drive itself continuously for the next 30 hours/2000 miles, and pull itself into a rest stop outside the target city, where another trucker will drive it the remainder of the trip.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I wonder how hard and how much more expensive it would be to build a warehouse designed for automated trucks. Seems like it shouldn't be too much trouble to have closed off sections where only automated trucks are allowed for most of the time. And then they would feed to special access roads designed to be safe and easy to navigate.
- aembleton 4y ago
  What if there is an accident along the main route and a diversion is set up down side roads that haven't been exhaustively mapped?
thehappypm 4y ago
I don’t think mountain passes are low-hanging-fruit. But high winds should be more doable, in fact with wind sensors on trucks you might be able to have a lot of stabilization that even beats a human. A human is skilled but reacting to stimuli from their perch in the cab.
bostonsre 4y ago
My father was a truck driver and from the stories I've heard, yes I think it's a very difficult job in a lot of cases. eg. hauling doubles (two trailers linked together) during snow storms down steep inclines and having to fight the back of the trailer jack knifing as it swings one way, then the other, over and over until at the bottom of a slope.
- dagw 4y ago
  I would imagine that would be exactly the sort of things that robots could actually handle much better than humans. You would load up the trucks and trailers with sensors so that the AI knows exactly what is happening, force wise on every part of the trailer with millisecond accuracy, including full data on things like friction under the wheels, and the road surface temperature and road conditions ahead. Add a detailed 3D map of the whole road and the robot driver should handle this fine. Robots will even have advantages over humans since they can do things like control exact levels of breaking, power and even steering to each wheel independently giving them far more manoeuvring options than what a human has.
  - bostonsre 4y ago
    I'm sure it would be possible, but I would assume controlling fish tailing tractor trailers in snow would be on the harder end of the spectrum of automating truck driver problems. It is a hard problem and there is a lot more risk to human life than automating a taxi in a city. Even if they perform better than real life drivers, it seems like we are trending towards requiring perfection and we might be a long way out to a scalable solution.
    - dagw 4y ago
      controlling fish tailing tractor trailers in snow would be on the harder end of the spectrum of automating truck driver problems Yes and no. On the one hand it's hard problem because of all the variables involved, on the other hand it's easy because it's 'just' a physics problem. There is no trying to second guess the intentions of other humans acting weirdly, no trying to decipher hastily erected diversion signs, no trying to interpret what that guy standing in the road waving a sign at you actually wants you to do etc.
sangnoir 4y ago
> I'm not sure how an AI is going to deal with high wind or mountain passes. More sensors? It shouldn't be too difficult to detect cross-wind or shear forces: I'm not in robotics, but I can think of several different ways to do this (sensing sideways forces applied by trailer to the coupling, or laser emitter/sensor pair or even a camera on the truck with high-contrast markers affixed onto the trailer

eloff 4y ago

Ironically those kinds of things are the things AI deals with most easily. That's all math and physics. The hard part is understanding the environment and adapting the the unexpected.

mathgladiator 4y ago
That is the hard part, and the high wind on mountains create interesting and unexpected scenarios. Mountains are primarily a slow-going thing, but wind bursts create insane environments which are really only felt. It's going to be a factory of edge cases for both the AI to handle directly and interpret of other vehicles.

ehnto 4y ago

There is also the off-highway challenges, you still have all the same requirements as full car automation in dense districts, except now you're in a long and wide truck managing a highly-destructive amount of tonnage. Sure the majority is on the highway, but your trailer has a destination, and your truck a depot, and it's often somewhere dense and busy. I think for full automation soon, it could only happen for specific routes and operations that have set themselves up on the highways with minimal challenges off-highway. Like grain hauling. You could have the trailers dropped off at depots by bots and taken into town by drivers, but at that point you're building infrastructure specifically for highway hauling and still using local trucks for the last mile, you may as well have built a rail network.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ovao 4y ago
The infrastructure around both long-haul and last-mile or LTL truck transport is already a thing, so in some circumstances the game doesn’t change that much under this model. Train transport is unfortunately extraordinarily complicated in comparison. It’s a great option in some cases, but a totally non-viable option in many others.
- ehnto 4y ago
  It's true, the other upside to the road network is that it already exists, and so private companies can use it now not after a long period of lobbying to get rail introduced when it does make sense.
gscott 4y ago
It would make more sense to put rfid tags into those rubber reflectors and put those on the freeways and have trucks follow those then do all of the work for full self driving, cheaper too. A human driver can take over for the last mile. The truck would read the rfid tags and each would have a database entry of the gps of each tag.
- ehnto 4y ago
  You still need full self driving I think. Car cuts you off, tire flat where and when does it pull off? Load gets unbalanced, wind shear throws you off line, road ragers, unexpected hazards, unmarked construction zones, weather and road condition changes.. you get it. I think the remote driver is going to be too slow to respond in the majority of cases where circumstances are unexpected. What about load too, not having enough drivers to respond to incidents at peak wouldn't really be acceptable. I think it's useful to note that we haven't even fully automated trains yet, which should show that even when most variables are accounted for you still need a robust detection and decision engine at the helm.
matt_heimer 4y ago
If low latency, high bandwidth satellite internet becomes common couldn't there be a remote pool of drivers that monitor and take over when needed?
- v-erne 4y ago
  That's very interesting way of looking at it - we do not need to fully automate cars to put millions people out of work. If we just create automated assistants (similar to plane autopilots) that takes care of 80% of work we can then create remote driving centers for people (drone pilots) that take over when thinks go wrong. Add some specialized road patrols to handle the on ground problems (changing tires) and driving truck as a job will go from one of the most popular jobs to an outlier.
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    Love the idea, but this sounds exceptionally difficult to legislate for and regulate properly. Who is liable in case the remote operator makes a mistake? What if the remote operator does not make a mistake, but the connection is not stable? Do the remote operators need full HGV licences? Could they be outsourced to a third party? A third party in another country?
    - v-erne 4y ago
      And what happens when air traffic controller make mistake? Or the terminal malfunctions? This somehow did not limit air travel boom. Those are really minor problems when there are thrillions to be made.
      - d1sxeyes 4y ago
        > And what happens when air traffic controller make mistake Then the human pilots in control of the aeroplanes try not to crash into each other.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  You don't even need satellite internet... Realistically power might be biggest issue. Otherwise you can just bury some fiber next or under the road and then use terrestrial solutions. Probably with decent beam forming directionally over the road you don't even need that many base stations.
bonestamp2 4y ago
Maybe they should just automate the long sectors and then a human jumps in the cab to drive the truck for the last few complicated miles. The humans would probably prefer that too (for the most part) since they could go home every night.
- behringer 4y ago
  That's exactly what will happen but who's going to pay a trucker 95k a year to park trucks 8 hours a day 5 days a week?
  - IMTDb 4y ago
    Walmart, apparently. They'll employ less truckers than now since each one will be able to handle more trucks, but they'll need some.
    - behringer 4y ago
      Last mile delivery looks to be about half that, around 50k/year.
  - bonestamp2 4y ago
    If everything else was in place for this to work, I don't think you'd have to pay someone $95k to do it. To me, the $95k pay rate has a lot to do with the time on the road and away from home. Walmart might have to pay $95k for that now, but as autonomous driving takes on some of those miles, the human pay will likely go down (adjusted for inflation).
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  If they have to share roads with other drivers or the roads are unprotected from the elements, people, animals, debris, etc, you'd still need human-level intelligence to prevent harm or catastrophic loss.

markdown 4y ago

Airliners have been dealing with high winds for decades. > I'm not sure how an AI is going to deal with high wind or mountain passes. Better than humans, probably.

thehappypm 4y ago
Airliners have it easier though. Hitting a weird wind pocket means a plane might drop 50 feet and everyone on board jolts awake and drinks spill. In a truck that’s a catastrophic crash. And no planes have zero pilots to take over..
- sangnoir 4y ago
  My car's traction-control reacts faster than any human; often the dash light is the only indication I have that the car had lost traction for a fraction of a second and corrected for it. I don't see how automated systems would struggle with "sudden" wind changes that take humans half a second or more to react (which is eons for computers at modern clock speeds).
steve76 4y ago

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

I expect it will be much like harbor pilots pulling ships into crowded ports: the tricky stuff will be handled by highly skilled humans, the easy stuff (long highway miles through cornfields ok flyover states) by AIs. There will be a few exhaustively mapped and highly trafficked main routes where the truckers will carefully pull out of a warehouse and drive to the onramp, get out, and take a shuttle back to the warehouse. The truck will drive itself continuously for the next 30 hours/2000 miles, and pull itself into a rest stop outside the target city, where another trucker will drive it the remainder of the trip.

Ekaros 4y ago
I wonder how hard and how much more expensive it would be to build a warehouse designed for automated trucks. Seems like it shouldn't be too much trouble to have closed off sections where only automated trucks are allowed for most of the time. And then they would feed to special access roads designed to be safe and easy to navigate.
aembleton 4y ago
What if there is an accident along the main route and a diversion is set up down side roads that haven't been exhaustively mapped?

thehappypm 4y ago

I don’t think mountain passes are low-hanging-fruit. But high winds should be more doable, in fact with wind sensors on trucks you might be able to have a lot of stabilization that even beats a human. A human is skilled but reacting to stimuli from their perch in the cab.

bostonsre 4y ago

My father was a truck driver and from the stories I've heard, yes I think it's a very difficult job in a lot of cases. eg. hauling doubles (two trailers linked together) during snow storms down steep inclines and having to fight the back of the trailer jack knifing as it swings one way, then the other, over and over until at the bottom of a slope.

dagw 4y ago
I would imagine that would be exactly the sort of things that robots could actually handle much better than humans. You would load up the trucks and trailers with sensors so that the AI knows exactly what is happening, force wise on every part of the trailer with millisecond accuracy, including full data on things like friction under the wheels, and the road surface temperature and road conditions ahead. Add a detailed 3D map of the whole road and the robot driver should handle this fine. Robots will even have advantages over humans since they can do things like control exact levels of breaking, power and even steering to each wheel independently giving them far more manoeuvring options than what a human has.
- bostonsre 4y ago
  I'm sure it would be possible, but I would assume controlling fish tailing tractor trailers in snow would be on the harder end of the spectrum of automating truck driver problems. It is a hard problem and there is a lot more risk to human life than automating a taxi in a city. Even if they perform better than real life drivers, it seems like we are trending towards requiring perfection and we might be a long way out to a scalable solution.
  - dagw 4y ago
    controlling fish tailing tractor trailers in snow would be on the harder end of the spectrum of automating truck driver problems Yes and no. On the one hand it's hard problem because of all the variables involved, on the other hand it's easy because it's 'just' a physics problem. There is no trying to second guess the intentions of other humans acting weirdly, no trying to decipher hastily erected diversion signs, no trying to interpret what that guy standing in the road waving a sign at you actually wants you to do etc.

sangnoir 4y ago

> I'm not sure how an AI is going to deal with high wind or mountain passes. More sensors? It shouldn't be too difficult to detect cross-wind or shear forces: I'm not in robotics, but I can think of several different ways to do this (sensing sideways forces applied by trailer to the coupling, or laser emitter/sensor pair or even a camera on the truck with high-contrast markers affixed onto the trailer