No Safety Driver Here—Volvo’s New Driverless Truck Cuts the Cab
No Safety Driver Here—Volvo’s New Driverless Truck Cuts
the Cab
By Vanessa Bates Ramirez - Oct 11, 20189,071
Each time there’s a headline about driverless trucking
technology, another piece is taken out of the old equation. First, an Uber/Otto
truck’s safety driver went hands-off once the truck reached the highway (and
said truck successfully delivered its valuable cargo of 50,000 beers). Then,
Starsky Robotics announced its trucks would start making autonomous deliveries
without a human in the vehicle at all.
Now, Volvo has taken the tech one step further. Its new
trucks not only won’t have safety drivers, they won’t even have the option of
putting safety drivers behind the wheel, because there is no wheel—and no cab,
either.
Vera, as the technology’s been dubbed, was unveiled in
September, and consists of a sort of flat-Tesla-like electric car with a
standard trailer hookup. The vehicles are connected to a cloud service, which
also connects them to each other and to a control center. The control center
monitors the trucks’ positioning (they’re designed to locate their position to
within centimeters), battery charge, load content, service requirements, and
other variables. The driveline and battery pack used in the cars are the same
as those Volvo uses in its existing electric trucks.
You won’t see these cruising down an interstate highway,
though, or even down a local highway. Vera trucks are designed to be used on
short, repetitive routes contained within limited areas—think shipping ports,
industrial parks, or logistics hubs. They’re limited to slower speeds than
normal cars or trucks, and will be able to operate 24/7. “We will see much
higher delivery precision, as well as improved flexibility and productivity,”
said Mikael Karlsson, VP of Autonomous Solutions at Volvo Trucks. “Today’s
operations are often designed according to standard daytime work hours, but a
solution like Vera opens up the possibility of continuous round-the-clock
operation and a more optimal flow. This in turn can minimize stock piles and
increase overall productivity.”
The trucks are sort of like bigger versions of Amazon’s
Kiva robots, which scoot around the aisles of warehouses and fulfillment
centers moving pallets between shelves and fetching goods to be shipped.
Pairing trucks like Vera with robots like Kiva makes for
a fascinating future landscape of logistics and transport; cargo will be moved
from docks to warehouses by a large, flat robot-on-wheels, then distributed
throughout that warehouse by smaller, flat robots-on-wheels. To really see the
automated process through to the end point, even smaller flat robots-on-wheels
will be used to deliver peoples’ goods right to their front doors.
Sounds like a lot of robots and not a lot of humans,
right? Anticipating its technology’s implication in the ongoing uproar over
technological unemployment, Volvo has already made statements about its
intentions to continue to employ humans alongside the driverless trucks. “I
foresee that there will be an increased level of automation where it makes
sense, such as for repetitive tasks. This in turn will drive prosperity and
increase the need for truck drivers in other applications,” said Karlsson.
The end-to-end automation concept has already been put
into practice in Caofeidian, a northern Chinese city that houses the world’s
first fully autonomous harbor, aiming to be operational by the end of this
year. Besides replacing human-driven trucks with autonomous ones (made by
Chinese startup TuSimple), the port is using automated cranes and a
coordinating central control system.
Besides Uber/Otto, Tesla, or Daimler, which are all
working on driverless trucks with a more conventional design (meaning they
still have a cab and look like you’d expect a truck to look), Volvo also has
competition from a company called Einride. The Swedish startup’s electric,
cabless T/Pod looks a lot like Vera, but has some fundamental differences.
Rather than being tailored to short distances and high capacity, Einride’s
trucks are meant for medium distance and capacity, like moving goods from a
distribution center to a series of local stores.
Vera trucks are currently still in the development phase.
But since their intended use is quite specific and limited (Karlsson noted
“Vera is not intended to be a solution for everyone, everywhere”), the
technology could likely be rolled out faster than its more general-use
counterparts. Having cabless electric trucks take over short routes in closed
environments would be one more baby step along the road to a driverless
future—and a testament to the fact that self-driving technology will move into
our lives and our jobs incrementally, ostensibly giving us the time we’ll need
to adapt and adjust.
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