STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN: The driver of a 40-ton self-driving truck and trailer (lorries) barrels down a highway south of Stockholm in Sweden while keeping a sharp eye on the road but, jarringly, not holding the steering wheel.
Instead, the truck drives itself, with senior driver Roger Nordqvist present solely in the event of an emergency.
Scania, a Swedish truck manufacturer, is not the only automaker testing self-driving cars, but it is the first in Europe to test them while transporting commercial items. “We transfer their products from point A to point B completely autonomously,” Peter Hafmar, Scania’s head of autonomous solutions, tells AFP outside the company’s transport facility in Sodertalje, south of Stockholm.
According to the AFP, the self-driving truck is delivering fast food along a 300-kilometer (186-mile) stretch between Sodertalje and Jonkoping in southern Sweden in the pilot project. From the outside, the vehicle looks almost identical to any other lorry, save for a rail on the roof loaded with cameras and two sensors on the sides resembling bug antennae.
The wheel and seats are where you’d expect them to be inside the cab, but small devices and screens dot the dashboard, and a tangle of wires leads to the computer rack behind the passenger seat.
Self-driving lorries drive better by themselves
Goran Fjallid, an engineer, is seated in the passenger seat next to the safety driver and has his eyes glued to his laptop, which is receiving video from the truck’s cameras and text that contains information about what the vehicle is seeing.
A 3D representation of the truck on the road and all nearby cars is displayed on a second screen.
The various technologies work as backups for one another as the lorry combines all the input from the various sensors with a GPS system. It will use the GPS and stay perfectly in its lane if the road markings temporarily vanish, according to Fjallid.
He continues, “It drives better on its own than when you drive it manually.”
But he admits that getting the truck to that point required a lot of trial and error.
They had to make adjustments to the truck’s handling of merging onto the highway and responding to other vehicles cutting in front of it. Fjallid records the precise time every time the truck makes an unexpected manoeuvre, like braking or slowing down for no apparent reason, so the logs and data can be checked.
The sensors on the truck are also adjusted each day before driving. Before driverless trucks, which operate without safety drivers, are a common sight on the road, according to Hafmar, there are still some technological and legal challenges to be overcome.
According to Hafmar, they plan to have this completed by the end of the 2020s or the start of the 2030s.
No more drivers for trucks? The employment of truck drivers, one of the most prevalent occupations worldwide, may be threatened by the development of self-driving trucks. But Hafmar is adamant that we need autonomous vehicles to address the global driver shortage.
Furthermore, he asserts that it will take a while before artificial intelligence is capable of handling all facets of logistics. Long-distance deliveries will probably be made in the beginning by self-driving trucks, but the last-mile delivery to stores and customers “will happen with human drivers,” according to Hafmar.
There will be about 2.6 million unfilled truck driving positions globally in 2021, according to a report from the International Road Transport Union (IRU) in June.
Hafmar also highlights additional potential advantages, such as the ability to schedule trips for times when there is less traffic or to drive more slowly for longer periods of time to conserve fuel because computers don’t require sleep or rest.
Many other businesses are competing to introduce self-driving trucks. Start-ups In the United States, tests are being conducted by Aurora, Waymo, Embark, Kodiak, and Torc (along with Daimler), while Baidu in China announced the launch of a self-driving truck in late 2021.
In Europe, IVECO is collaborating with the Amazon-backed California start-up Plus, and they recently announced the conclusion of their initial circuit testing phase. Road tests will also start. The German-road test programme will soon be launched by the Swedish company Einride.
