Milestones in Daimler’s connected trucking

1886

Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz invent horseless mobility.

For good measure, Daimler and Benz render the horse-drawn transport cart obsolete by filing a patent application for a truck.

Daimler-benz AG initiates the Prometheus research project, aimed at making road traffic in Europe safer, more economical, more environment-friendly, more comfortable and more efficient.

Development of on-board electronic systems, mobile communications technology, the use of GPS data. And, of course, the Internet.

Promote Chauffeur: two trucks linked by an electronic “drawbar”.

Fleetboard telematics introduced.

Interface allows telematics to integrate data into forwarding agents’ own software systems in addition to Dispopilot, a mobile hand-held device for logistics management, navigation and scanning.

Remote diagnostics implemented.

Connectivity identifed as integral element of technology strategy.

Highway Pilot: multiple, smart trucks can be interconnected.

ALL BY MYSELF

These kinds of technologies – and a few others besides – all come together, of course, in autonomous drive. Highway Pilot, Daimler’s system for autonomously driving trucks, keeps an individual vehicle in touch with its surroundings by radar and camera systems. It combines adaptive cruise control and lane departure warning systems. However, in a first, it also incorporates steering intervention.

Highway Pilot functionality is initially limited to motorways, which lend themselves to this kind of operation because of their layout and traffic flow. Conceivably, though, it could be extended to non-motorway truck routes.

A further developoment is Highway Pilot Connect. Interconnection enables two or more trucks to form a platoon observing the tightest safety distance of 15 m while maintaining the same speed. The close distance between the vehicles reduces drag, resulting in a substantial lowering of fuel consumption and emissions – on average by up to seven per cent for all vehicles in the platoon.

Where the early Promote Chauffeur project essentially amounted to a fairy rigidly linked two-vehicle road train, Highway Pilot Connect makes it possible to link up several autonomous smart trucks teaming up temporarily for practical purposes. It also allows cars to weave in and out of the lane being used by Highway Pilot Connect. Because they are connected to each other, their surrounds and other roadusers, they react as one to unforeseen events. Braking is automatic with a reaction time of only one tenth of a second – far swifter than human driver’s response. The technology available makes it possible for, say, a camera on the leading vehicle to relay images to monitors on board the following vehicles.

TRAFFIC JAMMING

Last year, Germany alone reported 568 000 traffic jams. Road users spent 341 000 hours stuck in traffic. By receiving and passing on information about their movements, fully connected trucks can provide one another with warnings about traffic jams and unnecessary waiting times, while the entire population of such vehicles can prevent many traffic jams from the outset, says Daimler.

As an indication of just how smart the dumb goods transporter envisaged 120 years ago has become, Mercedes-benz says its present-day Actros already incorporates hundreds of millions of lines of software code – more than an airliner’s. On a modern semitrailer/tractor combination, 400 sensors provide data to optimise drivetrain operation and minimise fuel consumption and emissions. The anticipatory cruise control system Predictive Powertrain Control (PPC), for instance, correlates the data from 3-D road maps with the data collected from the truck’s drivetrain. Using that data, it’s able to anticipate gearshifts and braking better than any human. It can even teach a driver how to be better. (While he still has a job, presumably.)

In fact, the company says, transport is evolving into a selflearning system that is integrated into the overarching logistical environment. Autonomously driving trucks will seek appropriate partners on their route automatically, with plannable journey times improving scheduling at ramps and loading doors. Docking will take place automatically or with a smartphone app from outside of the vehicle, combined with the vehicles’ built-in Active Parking Assist function.

ONE HAPPY FAMILY

On a wider scale, the data that is collected provides the basis for precise fleet control. Take that a step further, and you have connectivity that permanently links the driver and vehicle with operations planning, with consigner and consignee, with other vehicles and with the infrastructure, as well as with other drivers, friends and family.

At the same time as they are consuming data, of course, trucks are themselves collecting data while on the move. That’s a distinct plus for V2I, where trucks will be data distributors to infrastructure such as enabled traffic signs and signal gantries. Information it can pass on could include traffic, weather and road conditions, benefiting all road users. By extension, this information could be useful to insurance companies, which are able to identify individual risk profiles depending on mileage and types of use and can thus adapt their premiums with bonus systems on an individual basis. Not only in terms of individual fleets, as has been the case to date, but also at the level of individual trucks and their drivers.

From the ergonomic point of view, the driver will be able to enjoy a flexibly designed dashboard that enables different cab layouts and usage scenarios to those that apply today. The use of devices such as tablets for interaction with the vehicle will become commonplace.

In the long term, this could even result in unforeseen events being, well, foreseeable.

No more sudden panic, then, when cresting the brow of a