U.S. startup targets self-driving long-haul truck market

[gary]

Senior Editor, Philip E. Ross, reports on the Institute of Electrical &
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum magazine web site that a
startup formed by veterans of the Google car project are targeting
self-driving long-haul trucks.

Originally Posted by Philip E. Ross, IEEE Spectrum

Anthony Levandowski left the Google car project to start the company back in January, the Wall Street Journal reports. Lior Ron, who had been in charge of Google Maps, also joined, along with 39 others, including some from Tesla and Apple—both of which are also working on robocar technology.

Levandowski told the Journal that his company, which he calls Otto for short, would seek a competitive advantage by retrofitting existing trucks rather than putting self-driving systems into new ones. Otto, so far mostly a self-funded operation, is working with three Volvo trucks.

Originally Posted by Philip E. Ross, IEEE Spectrum

Other firms are taking a different tack. For instance, Peloton Technology, of Mountain View, Calif., specializes in platooning, in which a lead truck driven by a professional driver leads a string of autonomous trucks behind it. Volvo, an investor in Peloton, has long been a pioneer of platooning, as it recently demonstrated with three convoys of two or three trucks each; the longest convoy trip was from Stockholm to Rotterdam.

Drivers had to be in all the trucks, and they had to attend to the road, as the laws still require. But even so, platooning saves time and money by allowing the trucks to stay in close formation, thus minimizing air resistance.

Article and video here -
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-t...lace-teamsters

[sn1987a (Barry)]

Shouldn't be a problem. All those unemployed middle aged truck drivers have to do is go back to university for a 100k STEM degree, learn to code and bam!, new higher paying job at Google or Facebook.

[Kunama]

With all these advances in technology, I won't be surprised if someone decides to stretch parallel steel tracks from one side of the country to the other and move freight on that instead of running on second rate bitumen highway with passenger cars .......

[AstralTraveller (David)]

Don't we already have our own forms of 'platooning' in Australia? One is called road trains. The other is called %$@!&^%$ idiots who tailgate.

[bojan]

Originally Posted by Kunama

With all these advances in technology, I won't be surprised if someone decides to stretch parallel steel tracks from one side of the country to the other and move freight on that instead of running on second rate bitumen highway with passenger cars .......

Railway