11 ms·

Self driving cars are going to upend this industry (eventually). Many mining companies are actively working on getting their mining equipment to be automated t

by acadien 12y ago

Self driving cars are going to upend this industry (eventually). Many mining companies are actively working on getting their mining equipment to be automated to do the riskier jobs without risking drivers. The same ideas apply here. Remove the driver and suddenly you have a truck that runs deliveries 24/7 and only stops to refuel and get serviced. One would hope that as the technology gets more sophisticated the number of accidents would drop, the vehicles could safely drive and react at higher speeds, and of course self optimize their routes and driving styles to save on fuel.

akira2501 12y ago
It's not really the vehicles. It's the loading docks, the fueling stations, the truck scales and all the rest of the infrastructure that supports trucking. All of those are going to need to have "automated truck" support as well, not to mention, when an 18 wheeler blows out a tire, you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop, but even more skills and equipment to effect the repair. Mining operations are easier because they work on their own property and aren't required to mix with other passenger vehicles. I know you said "eventually," but I suspect that it's going to take at least 50 years before we're anywhere even close.
- t413 12y ago
  you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop True, but that's skill most drivers don't have. Add in-wheel pressure and temperature sensors-- plus scheduled maintenance checkups and that problem mostly goes away. There are also numerous examples of adaptive control systems landing aircraft after major failures (quadcopters with 3 props, planes with 1 wing) that humans can't handle. You bring up good difficulties. Still-- most of those problems have solutions and I sure hope it's sooner than 50 years from now we see self-driving long-haul trucks on the road.
  - akira2501 12y ago
    > True, but that's skill most drivers don't have. [...] after major failures (quadcopters with 3 props, planes with 1 wing) that humans can't handle. These are decent examples, but don't most of them only account for the safeyy of the controlled vehicle itself? I mean, it's impressive that a quad copter can land itself after a partial failure, but can it do it over a crowded city? With a hazardous load? Can the control software understand NFPA 704 of it's own cargo, plus the cargo of other vehicles near it and make appropriate decisions? All of this possibly near the maximum weight ratings for it's transportation type? I'm _all_ for automation, and I think it's the next most logical direction of our society; however, I think people tend to underestimate the totality of challenges involved especially for cargo transport.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      No problem was ever solved by trying to solve all other problems at the same time.
- kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  > when an 18 wheeler blows out a tire, you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop, but even more skills and equipment to effect the repair. An automated truck won't need a conventional cab. It could essentially be a powered sled that rigidly attaches to a trailer with much less forward projection. This would be easier to control in emergency stops.
  - burger_moon 12y ago
    Except that trucks usually don't haul the same trailer day in and day out. Also when a truck is loaded the driver has to check weight, balance and shift the pins around on the trailer and 5th. Who does that what the load shifts because the truck made an evasive maneuver out on the road in bfe middle of Utah? There's a lot of aspects to driving otr that people don't realize. This industry already operates on tight margins so bringing in new tech which may be beneficially in the long run is hard to justify for most small companies and owner operator outfits.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 12y ago
  One huge advantage of a self driving truck is it can easily wait 4+ hours for a tow truck to arrive for minor repairs at little cost. Or be swapped out for another rig and hauled off for more major repairs.
  - akira2501 12y ago
    If your logistics operation allows for that, sure; most do not. You want to do as much work with as little miles as is possible, so turning the trucks over quickly is important.
    - Retric 12y ago
      There comes a point where industry overhead buffers you. What I mean by that is if the most cost effective big rig truck gets say 10MPG then that cost gets built into the market rate. If a new truck design gets 15MPG and costs more you can figure out the costs vs what's out on the market and see if it's an improvement. As to self-driving trucks, sure there are downsides. But, I suspect the net efficiency gains can offset them in most situations. Once most shipping companies switch the downsides will just be 'industry overhead' until their dealt with.
      - akira2501 12y ago
        > What I mean by that is if the most cost effective big rig truck gets say 10MPG then that cost gets built into the market rate. If a new truck design gets 15MPG and costs more you can figure out the costs vs what's out on the market and see if it's an improvement. I see your point, but that's a particularly poor example. Most shippers will pass the fuel costs as a "fuel surcharge" on to the customer. If you're an owner/operator, this is the most lucrative part of the business, and is really the whole reason to be an O&O in the first place. Trucking is just a really strange business.
        Retric 12y ago
        The amount you tack on as a fuel charge is based on what the market will bare not what your actually paying for fuel. http://yrc.com/fuel-surcharge-us/ http://yrc.com/fuel-surcharge-us/ Note there updating there numbers on a weekly basis and they have nothing to do with the actual costs.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  > All of those are going to need to have "automated truck" support as well Do they? The trucks don't need to automate 100% of tasks for initial implementation, the first ones will be driverless in-between cities (or driver-nap in-between cities) with manned fueling, loading docks, scales, etc. This will require some changes, but I don't think it will be too much of an issue to move toward full-serve gasoline service in the interim.
  - akira2501 12y ago
    > Do they? If you want them to be economically competitive, then yes. The largest current expense is the driver salary, mostly due to the low quality of the working conditions and extended stays away from your "home." If you're still carting people around in the truck, then you will have a difficult time competing with large personnel and technology expenses. What I'm trying to suggest is that a fully automated nation-wide delivery service is going to be exceptionally difficult and will take a long time. This is mostly from the perspective of OTR/long-haul transportation. You'll likely see faster adoption on smaller scales such as in-city delivery services like grocery delivery and the like. It will blossom outward from there but it's still going to be a very long process.
    - Scoundreller 12y ago
      > If you're still carting people around in the truck, then you will have a difficult time competing with large personnel and technology expenses. The response would be to have people fixed at these scales/fuel stops/docks that handle what the driver would have been doing.
    - acadien 12y ago
      The idea that you can automate driving a car between cities seems feasible to you (with traffic, and variable weather), but automating fueling doesn't? Really which seems like a more complex task to you? Loading and unloading the vehicle at docks will adjust to meet a happy medium. As you already mentioned the single biggest expense is the driver, eliminating that is key, everything else will adjust accordingly.
at-fates-hands 12y ago
I've always be leery of self driving cars. They run on software. Software is only is good as the guy programming it. What happens when the software develops a bug? Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph? For all of the great things we know self driving cars can potentially bring to the table, how do we account for the issue of buggy software?
- Evolved 12y ago
  At least the bug is able to be diagnosed and traced along where it started from all the way until the accident where it caused a problem. Try diagnosing someone suddenly getting pissed off and cutting off another driver which sets off a chain reaction of the events leading up to a multi-vehicle collision. The driver may attempt to cover-up, deny or lie about what happened to protect themselves whereas the software would not have such self-preservation and would report things as they occurred without being concerned with assigning blame or establishing guilt. Software is not going to turn its head and rubberneck at an accident and in turn, rear end the car in front of it.
- rogerbinns 12y ago
  You mean you'd prefer humans to do the driving? Youtube is full of human examples - start here as an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ - and note that it ranges from minor fender benders through some very serious injuries and destruction. There are lots of examples of not being able to stay in lane, pulling out, not seeing stopped traffic, not paying attention to surroundings. Humans can't even get the trivial simple things right in broad daylight. (Yes I am aware that you are in the 97% of drivers who are absolutely convinced they are above average. That doesn't make it true. Yes the video mainly has clips from Russia - you can find USA based ones too. And a 9/11 happens on US roads each and every month. People are dying in large numbers because of human drivers.) Edit: added warning about video content
  - jaryd 12y ago
    You might want to put a warning before or after that link to indicate that it contains some pretty disturbing content...
Systemic33 12y ago
We are still a long way from vehicles without human occupants. The most modern lorries by Mercedes-Benz are very autonoumous, but still need a driver to be with the lorry. Since lorries rarely just go from marked up parking spot to parking spot, but at their destinations probably have to navigate unconventional layouts, etc, they will for the forseeable future include drivers. But what I expect to see happen, is that the logistics will become more decentralized, since the driver can now spend more time on administration, and less on driving, essentially taking over the job of the company command central.
Evolved 12y ago
As the largest factor in accidents other than DUI is inattentiveness[1](tired or texting) then self-driving cars with limited ability for drivers to perform actions that could cause an accident or effect efficiency would be a huge boon. Imagine saying, "sorry my car cut off your car!" with sincerity and a little tongue-in-cheek humor as well. Then there's also the efficiency factor as far as maximizing capacity in lanes and maintaining speed to streamline commuting. Merging could be vastly improved if cars were able to zipper merge better. [1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfac/04085/ http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  These self-driving vehicles will most likely have a lower base risk for accidents - they don't get tired, they don't get distracted. However their potential for a Black Swan event is enormous. They could run perfectly for 5 years then an unexpected bug could cause 50% of vehicles to spontaneously accelerate to max speed and then pull a hard right..
B0Z 12y ago
Honest question. Don't you think this kind of AI is precisely the AI that Gates, Musk, and Hawking are warning against?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  No, they're warning us about an AI which could outsmart or outperform us, and lead to our demise as it pursues the goals we've encoded into it without realizing they lead to a result we don't want.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    pursues the goals we've encoded into it without realizing they lead to a result we don't want. Sounds like capitalism vs. the environment there.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Why? It's not that our (humanity's) goals are bad (they're good pretty much by definition); it's that we totally suck at formalizing them.
- kbenson 12y ago
  I don't think so. I think a case can be made that he's talking less about SkyNet and more about the risks something like an automated trading algorithm (or planning system, or any case where we put too much trust in a system as infallible) ten years in the future causing major disruption due to too much trust in a fallible system as being infallible. There's also the possibility that a true AI (not just a complex expert system as above) may be fallible just like a person in not being able to correctly account for the unknown unknowns. In the end I think it's about the difference between automating positions to make them more efficient (meaning it's still possible to do manually but less efficiently) and relying on things that are essentially impossible to do manually, such as an economic planning AI which may outperform regular economists 95% of the time. The question is what happens in that 5%, and will it catch the problem, and if not, will we keep listening to it as it takes us down a dangerous path.
nickthemagicman 12y ago
The amount of information an automated vehicle would have to be able to decipher to be capable of being truly autonomous is pretty much pushing beyond the most advanced A.I. and visual learning academia has discovered today. I don't know what gps resolves to but it's definitely not down to the foot that's required for some of the hairy situations truckers encounter on the road and our visual learning technology is terribly insufficient for even the most basic road conditions much less your average New England construction zone. Even google cars can't handle weather or potholes or unpredictable situations well. From what I read they had to be coded for very specific paths around San Fran and any unpredictability would cause them trouble. A more likely scenario in my mind is Drone trucks. Why can't a trucker head to the office drive his truck from his desk then go home at night? Combine that with some gps autopilot and/or magnetic strips in the road as a guide and that's totally realistic even with todays technology. These are more likely scenarios. Edit: even cooler would be autonomous or drone blimps carrying cargo! http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-187/ http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-18...
- Sophistifunk 12y ago
  Drone trucks would also provide a metric fuckton of training data for autonomous vehicle research. I dunno how much effect the lag would have on safety.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > I don't know what gps resolves to but it's definitely not down to the foot that's required for some of the hairy situations truckers encounter on the road Precision positioning, using correction data similar to WAAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) but heavily localized can provide sub-centimeter positioning data. This is already in use today for agriculture (self-driving combines, with waypoints configured from the farmer's desktop at home). > A more likely scenario in my mind is Drone trucks. Why can't a trucker head to the office drive his truck from his desk then go home at night? UAVs can stay flying if a signal is lost, or navigate using GPS to the nearest friendly runway to autoland if they lose touch with their pilot in the Las Vegas area (where most UAVs are piloted from). Ground vehicles traveling 60+ mph do not have this option. Therefore, AI is a superior option.

by acadien 12y ago

akira2501 12y ago

It's not really the vehicles. It's the loading docks, the fueling stations, the truck scales and all the rest of the infrastructure that supports trucking. All of those are going to need to have "automated truck" support as well, not to mention, when an 18 wheeler blows out a tire, you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop, but even more skills and equipment to effect the repair. Mining operations are easier because they work on their own property and aren't required to mix with other passenger vehicles. I know you said "eventually," but I suspect that it's going to take at least 50 years before we're anywhere even close.

t413 12y ago
you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop True, but that's skill most drivers don't have. Add in-wheel pressure and temperature sensors-- plus scheduled maintenance checkups and that problem mostly goes away. There are also numerous examples of adaptive control systems landing aircraft after major failures (quadcopters with 3 props, planes with 1 wing) that humans can't handle. You bring up good difficulties. Still-- most of those problems have solutions and I sure hope it's sooner than 50 years from now we see self-driving long-haul trucks on the road.
- akira2501 12y ago
  > True, but that's skill most drivers don't have. [...] after major failures (quadcopters with 3 props, planes with 1 wing) that humans can't handle. These are decent examples, but don't most of them only account for the safeyy of the controlled vehicle itself? I mean, it's impressive that a quad copter can land itself after a partial failure, but can it do it over a crowded city? With a hazardous load? Can the control software understand NFPA 704 of it's own cargo, plus the cargo of other vehicles near it and make appropriate decisions? All of this possibly near the maximum weight ratings for it's transportation type? I'm _all_ for automation, and I think it's the next most logical direction of our society; however, I think people tend to underestimate the totality of challenges involved especially for cargo transport.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    No problem was ever solved by trying to solve all other problems at the same time.
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
> when an 18 wheeler blows out a tire, you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop, but even more skills and equipment to effect the repair. An automated truck won't need a conventional cab. It could essentially be a powered sled that rigidly attaches to a trailer with much less forward projection. This would be easier to control in emergency stops.
- burger_moon 12y ago
  Except that trucks usually don't haul the same trailer day in and day out. Also when a truck is loaded the driver has to check weight, balance and shift the pins around on the trailer and 5th. Who does that what the load shifts because the truck made an evasive maneuver out on the road in bfe middle of Utah? There's a lot of aspects to driving otr that people don't realize. This industry already operates on tight margins so bringing in new tech which may be beneficially in the long run is hard to justify for most small companies and owner operator outfits.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Retric 12y ago
One huge advantage of a self driving truck is it can easily wait 4+ hours for a tow truck to arrive for minor repairs at little cost. Or be swapped out for another rig and hauled off for more major repairs.
- akira2501 12y ago
  If your logistics operation allows for that, sure; most do not. You want to do as much work with as little miles as is possible, so turning the trucks over quickly is important.
  - Retric 12y ago
    There comes a point where industry overhead buffers you. What I mean by that is if the most cost effective big rig truck gets say 10MPG then that cost gets built into the market rate. If a new truck design gets 15MPG and costs more you can figure out the costs vs what's out on the market and see if it's an improvement. As to self-driving trucks, sure there are downsides. But, I suspect the net efficiency gains can offset them in most situations. Once most shipping companies switch the downsides will just be 'industry overhead' until their dealt with.
    - akira2501 12y ago
      > What I mean by that is if the most cost effective big rig truck gets say 10MPG then that cost gets built into the market rate. If a new truck design gets 15MPG and costs more you can figure out the costs vs what's out on the market and see if it's an improvement. I see your point, but that's a particularly poor example. Most shippers will pass the fuel costs as a "fuel surcharge" on to the customer. If you're an owner/operator, this is the most lucrative part of the business, and is really the whole reason to be an O&O in the first place. Trucking is just a really strange business.
      - Retric 12y ago
        The amount you tack on as a fuel charge is based on what the market will bare not what your actually paying for fuel. http://yrc.com/fuel-surcharge-us/ http://yrc.com/fuel-surcharge-us/ Note there updating there numbers on a weekly basis and they have nothing to do with the actual costs.
Scoundreller 12y ago
> All of those are going to need to have "automated truck" support as well Do they? The trucks don't need to automate 100% of tasks for initial implementation, the first ones will be driverless in-between cities (or driver-nap in-between cities) with manned fueling, loading docks, scales, etc. This will require some changes, but I don't think it will be too much of an issue to move toward full-serve gasoline service in the interim.
- akira2501 12y ago
  > Do they? If you want them to be economically competitive, then yes. The largest current expense is the driver salary, mostly due to the low quality of the working conditions and extended stays away from your "home." If you're still carting people around in the truck, then you will have a difficult time competing with large personnel and technology expenses. What I'm trying to suggest is that a fully automated nation-wide delivery service is going to be exceptionally difficult and will take a long time. This is mostly from the perspective of OTR/long-haul transportation. You'll likely see faster adoption on smaller scales such as in-city delivery services like grocery delivery and the like. It will blossom outward from there but it's still going to be a very long process.
  - Scoundreller 12y ago
    > If you're still carting people around in the truck, then you will have a difficult time competing with large personnel and technology expenses. The response would be to have people fixed at these scales/fuel stops/docks that handle what the driver would have been doing.
  - acadien 12y ago
    The idea that you can automate driving a car between cities seems feasible to you (with traffic, and variable weather), but automating fueling doesn't? Really which seems like a more complex task to you? Loading and unloading the vehicle at docks will adjust to meet a happy medium. As you already mentioned the single biggest expense is the driver, eliminating that is key, everything else will adjust accordingly.

at-fates-hands 12y ago

I've always be leery of self driving cars. They run on software. Software is only is good as the guy programming it. What happens when the software develops a bug? Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph? For all of the great things we know self driving cars can potentially bring to the table, how do we account for the issue of buggy software?

Evolved 12y ago
At least the bug is able to be diagnosed and traced along where it started from all the way until the accident where it caused a problem. Try diagnosing someone suddenly getting pissed off and cutting off another driver which sets off a chain reaction of the events leading up to a multi-vehicle collision. The driver may attempt to cover-up, deny or lie about what happened to protect themselves whereas the software would not have such self-preservation and would report things as they occurred without being concerned with assigning blame or establishing guilt. Software is not going to turn its head and rubberneck at an accident and in turn, rear end the car in front of it.
rogerbinns 12y ago
You mean you'd prefer humans to do the driving? Youtube is full of human examples - start here as an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ - and note that it ranges from minor fender benders through some very serious injuries and destruction. There are lots of examples of not being able to stay in lane, pulling out, not seeing stopped traffic, not paying attention to surroundings. Humans can't even get the trivial simple things right in broad daylight. (Yes I am aware that you are in the 97% of drivers who are absolutely convinced they are above average. That doesn't make it true. Yes the video mainly has clips from Russia - you can find USA based ones too. And a 9/11 happens on US roads each and every month. People are dying in large numbers because of human drivers.) Edit: added warning about video content
- jaryd 12y ago
  You might want to put a warning before or after that link to indicate that it contains some pretty disturbing content...

Systemic33 12y ago

We are still a long way from vehicles without human occupants. The most modern lorries by Mercedes-Benz are very autonoumous, but still need a driver to be with the lorry. Since lorries rarely just go from marked up parking spot to parking spot, but at their destinations probably have to navigate unconventional layouts, etc, they will for the forseeable future include drivers. But what I expect to see happen, is that the logistics will become more decentralized, since the driver can now spend more time on administration, and less on driving, essentially taking over the job of the company command central.

Evolved 12y ago

As the largest factor in accidents other than DUI is inattentiveness[1](tired or texting) then self-driving cars with limited ability for drivers to perform actions that could cause an accident or effect efficiency would be a huge boon. Imagine saying, "sorry my car cut off your car!" with sincerity and a little tongue-in-cheek humor as well. Then there's also the efficiency factor as far as maximizing capacity in lanes and maintaining speed to streamline commuting. Merging could be vastly improved if cars were able to zipper merge better. [1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfac/04085/ http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...

radicalbyte 12y ago
These self-driving vehicles will most likely have a lower base risk for accidents - they don't get tired, they don't get distracted. However their potential for a Black Swan event is enormous. They could run perfectly for 5 years then an unexpected bug could cause 50% of vehicles to spontaneously accelerate to max speed and then pull a hard right..

B0Z 12y ago

Honest question. Don't you think this kind of AI is precisely the AI that Gates, Musk, and Hawking are warning against?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 12y ago
No, they're warning us about an AI which could outsmart or outperform us, and lead to our demise as it pursues the goals we've encoded into it without realizing they lead to a result we don't want.
- pjc50 12y ago
  pursues the goals we've encoded into it without realizing they lead to a result we don't want. Sounds like capitalism vs. the environment there.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Why? It's not that our (humanity's) goals are bad (they're good pretty much by definition); it's that we totally suck at formalizing them.
kbenson 12y ago
I don't think so. I think a case can be made that he's talking less about SkyNet and more about the risks something like an automated trading algorithm (or planning system, or any case where we put too much trust in a system as infallible) ten years in the future causing major disruption due to too much trust in a fallible system as being infallible. There's also the possibility that a true AI (not just a complex expert system as above) may be fallible just like a person in not being able to correctly account for the unknown unknowns. In the end I think it's about the difference between automating positions to make them more efficient (meaning it's still possible to do manually but less efficiently) and relying on things that are essentially impossible to do manually, such as an economic planning AI which may outperform regular economists 95% of the time. The question is what happens in that 5%, and will it catch the problem, and if not, will we keep listening to it as it takes us down a dangerous path.

nickthemagicman 12y ago

The amount of information an automated vehicle would have to be able to decipher to be capable of being truly autonomous is pretty much pushing beyond the most advanced A.I. and visual learning academia has discovered today. I don't know what gps resolves to but it's definitely not down to the foot that's required for some of the hairy situations truckers encounter on the road and our visual learning technology is terribly insufficient for even the most basic road conditions much less your average New England construction zone. Even google cars can't handle weather or potholes or unpredictable situations well. From what I read they had to be coded for very specific paths around San Fran and any unpredictability would cause them trouble. A more likely scenario in my mind is Drone trucks. Why can't a trucker head to the office drive his truck from his desk then go home at night? Combine that with some gps autopilot and/or magnetic strips in the road as a guide and that's totally realistic even with todays technology. These are more likely scenarios. Edit: even cooler would be autonomous or drone blimps carrying cargo! http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-187/ http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-18...

Sophistifunk 12y ago
Drone trucks would also provide a metric fuckton of training data for autonomous vehicle research. I dunno how much effect the lag would have on safety.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
> I don't know what gps resolves to but it's definitely not down to the foot that's required for some of the hairy situations truckers encounter on the road Precision positioning, using correction data similar to WAAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) but heavily localized can provide sub-centimeter positioning data. This is already in use today for agriculture (self-driving combines, with waypoints configured from the farmer's desktop at home). > A more likely scenario in my mind is Drone trucks. Why can't a trucker head to the office drive his truck from his desk then go home at night? UAVs can stay flying if a signal is lost, or navigate using GPS to the nearest friendly runway to autoland if they lose touch with their pilot in the Las Vegas area (where most UAVs are piloted from). Ground vehicles traveling 60+ mph do not have this option. Therefore, AI is a superior option.