Driverless lorries
Are autonomous trucks the future of the road haulage industry?
It is estimated that the driver causes more than 90 per cent of accidents on the road, often due to tiredness, lapses in concentration, distraction or sometimes the influence of drink or drugs. So if most accidents are caused by human error, is it time to replace human drivers with machines? Some companies, including Google and Tesla, are starting to do just this with the creation of autonomous vehicles. In turn this has inevitably led to trucking corporations joining the game, which looks set to completely revolutionise the freighter industry.
The UK is set to spend £8 million ($10.6 million) trialling driverless lorries that use platooning technology, a system where several trucks drive in convoy, with the first controlled by a driver while the vehicles following are self-driving, capable of steering, braking and changing speed autonomously. As the platoon leader breaks, the trucks following in the convoy will do the same instantly and simultaneously.
A similar system is already in place in Singapore, where Scania and Toyota have been testing their self-driving buses and taxis on its streets. For the next three years the companies will operate a fleet of three driverless trucks following a manned platoon leader to transport cargo between ports.
However, taking the trucks from a controlled and predictable commercial environment on to heavily congested roads with other drivers is a new challenge altogether.
While it sounds like a massive development for the transport industry, it is actually only building on already established technology. It’s expected that the lorries will operate in a similar way to driverless cars, with radar sensors positioned around the vehicle to monitor the
location of nearby vehicles. They will also be equipped with video cameras responsible for detecting traffic lights, reading road signs and identifying obstacles, pedestrians and cyclists.
Detecting the edges of the road and lane markings is typically achieved using lidar sensors, which repetitively bounce light from the road. Ultrasonic sensors in the wheels can detect the location of curbs and other vehicles when parking, while a central computer analyses all of the data from various sensors in order to control steering, speed, acceleration and, most importantly, braking.
Some of these technologies are already on the road, such as autonomous emergency braking, which is already built into every truck in the UK — it can detect obstacles and automatically brake to avoid a crash.
Creating an autonomous truck is just joining all of these advancements together and refining them so it is safe and efficient for our roads.
Though safety concerns have been raised (such as how will a driverless car be programmed to respond to road rage, and what will happen if a car tries to squeeze between the small gap between two autonomous trucks in convoys) it is expected that the faster reaction times and more accurate spatial calculations will help to make our roads safer.
“if most road accidents are caused by human error, is it time to replace human drivers with machines?”