5 Autonomous Vehicle Technology Uses in Shipping and Logistics
Autonomous trucks and vehicles promise significant benefits for an industry that struggles with a growing labor shortage and the demand for shorter delivery times. The American Trucking Association estimates a shortage of as many as 174,500 drivers by 2024, due to an aging workforce and the difficulty of attracting younger drivers. Meanwhile, the rise of e-commerce and shorter delivery times is driving a need to overcome restrictions on hours driven and capital utilization.
According to McKinsey, 65% of the United States’ consumable goods are trucked to market. With full autonomy, operating costs would decrease by about 45%, saving the U.S. for-hire trucking industry between $85 and $125 billion. In addition to improved operational efficiencies, autonomous trucks and vehicles can help lower freight costs, improve truck utilization, reduce logistics costs, improve fuel efficiency — and, of course, reduce delivery times.
However, the thought of large trucks driving themselves on highways or in busy urban areas give rise to a number of concerns — and reasonably so. While progress is being made toward realizing the benefits of autonomous vehicle technology, manufacturers and technology developers are taking baby steps to ensure the right safety technology is in place and society is ready.
Here are five ways that autonomous vehicles and trucks will be used for shipping and logistics.
There is no possible advantage to autonomous vehicles. The initial cost would be huge, maintenance sky high, and liability cost through the roof when it will cause accidents and deaths. There is no way computers can or will be able to recognize lane, buses, street name signs, road debris, etc., in real time, at highway speeds. And while many are faking it with GPS, that is not at all reliable. GPS becomes unreliable ever 11 years with the solar maxima.
Hi Kirk,
You’re right: If autonomous vehicles were widespread, people would get hurt and be killed as a result. Playing devil’s advocate a bit, they do have some considerable advantages in the long run that humans don’t. Namely, a single autonomous vehicle can share its experience with other vehicles. That means a self-driving car or truck involved in a near accident can provide data to other vehicles on how to deal with similar situations. Second, it is entirely likely that when the technology matures, which may be more than a decade from now, that autonomous vehicles will prove they are safer than human drivers. They won’t be distracted, won’t drink and drive, etc. Third, GPS plays a limited role in autonomous vehicles. Manufacturers are using radar, lidar and sensor fusion in general. The idea of redundancy helps ensure that if there is a problem with a given sensor type, the car can still function normally. At least initially, it is likely autonomous vehicles will need better roads to function reliably. They tend to need clearly marked lanes. As far as street sign names and the like, all of that data can be potentially programmed into the maps they use to navigate. Given the rapid advances in computer vision in the past decade, it is relatively easy for such systems to recognize street signs, but the systems are vulnerable to adversarial machine learning. Many questions remain and the hype that once surrounded autonomous vehicles as faded quite a bit, but all of the research on the subject could lead to markedly better driver-assistance functions in mass-market vehicles in years to come, which could play a role in helping make fully autonomous vehicles a reality in the foreseeable future — even if their use is initially constrained to defined neighborhoods, highway lanes, etc.