US Postal Service Testing Self-Driving Trucks...
THE
USPS TESTS OUT SELF-DRIVING TRUCKS FOR HAULING MAIL
·
05.21.19 06:00 AM
Starting Tuesday, self-driving trucks built by startup TuSimple will haul
trailers full of mail and packages all by themselves. Well, mostly by
themselves: The 18-wheelers will have a certified driver and safety engineer
aboard, who will handle the driving on surface streets and take control from
the robot as needed. The pilot project will last two weeks and include five
round trips between the cities’ distribution hubs.
For the postal service,
autonomy might help it reverse an ugly financial situation. The agency, which
receives no tax dollars, has posted a loss every year for more than a decade.
Its five-year strategic plan, covering 2017–2021, is full of talk about being
open to innovative solutions. In February, it issued a request for information
saying it was investigating how autonomous vehicles could fit into its fleet.
It’s working with the University of Michigan on a self-driving truck to handle rural routes. In a
statement, a spokesperson called the pilot “just one of many ways the postal
service is innovating and investing in its future.”
For
TuSimple, it’s the chance to make some (undisclosed) revenue, pick up some
press coverage, and to test its technology against the rigors of a real-world
delivery service. The startup, which has headquarters in San Diego and Beijing,
bills itself as a master of computer vision. Its cameras can see and identify
threats about 1,000 meters away—more than half a mile and much farther than any lidar laser-scanning system. But this pilot is more of a
logistical than a technological exam.
To build a
high-resolution record of three freeways in three states, TuSimple executed
what founder and CTO Xiaodi Hou calls an “involuntary upgrade of our mapping
infrastructure.” (It used human-driven cars to do that work.) For the
1,000-mile, 20-hour drive, it had to increase the truck’s hard drive storage
space to handle all the data the system will produce. And it toughened up parts
of the system like the server that failed during a test ride WIRED took last
December.
If that kind of problem does strike, TuSimple can’t take all
day to get the vehicle back in action—not if it expects to keep its first
customer happy and eventually bring in others. “These are the hard requirements
that we will likely encounter in the future,” Hou says.
For this pilot, the human driver will handle the truck on
surface streets, but Hou says TuSimple is already looking to a second phase of
the pilot, where the robot does all the work. Meanwhile, it’s 400-person team
is working to expand the robot’s operating envelope.
The system can handle high winds, night driving
(handling high beams was a pain), and rain, Hou says, while ice on the road
remains “a nasty problem.” If it never succeeds, the postal service has a team
of mules up for the task.
Comments
Post a Comment