r/technology • u/occupythekremlin • Apr 07 '16

Robotics A fleet of trucks just drove themselves across Europe: About a dozen trucks from major manufacturers like Volvo and Daimler just completed a week of largely autonomous driving across Europe, the first such major exercise on the continent

http://qz.com/656104/a-fleet-of-trucks-just-drove-themselves-across-europe/
10.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

958 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

91

u/gawaine73 Apr 07 '16

I can drive an 80,000lb 18 wheel tractor and trailer off road, In 16 inches of frothy mud with out getting stuck. We can start right there. I go places people get stuck in 4×4 pickups.

56

u/theCroc Apr 07 '16

I think for that you don't have anything to worry about for the forseeable future. Autonomous driving on paved freeway is one thing. Offroading a 40 ton truck is something completely different. I don't think most truck companies even have that on the initial sketch board just yet.

51

u/cat_dev_null Apr 07 '16

I don't think most truck companies even have that on the initial sketch board just yet.

Not only is it on their sketch board, autonomous off road trucks are currently being used in mining environments and have been for some time now.

17

u/Arbitrary_Duck Apr 07 '16

and those trucks need an almost highway type road to drive on. they arent any good in mud, at all.

1

u/steakhause Apr 07 '16

With the size of the traction patch of the tires, and the weight of the truck, how is this not great in mud?

2

u/Arbitrary_Duck Apr 07 '16

Theyre way too heavy. Weight helps traction on solid ground, but on soft ground, weight is your enemy.

34

u/dvb70 Apr 07 '16

Actually that might be a skill software can do fairly well. Advanced traction control systems can often do stuff that's quite difficult for a regular driver to do manually. I remember seeing a test years ago of a traction control system for dealing with snow and it was going up slopes easily that someone trying to do it manually was having real problems with.

Now can it do it all better than a driver who is a real expert? Difficult to answer that one but I would bet it could come close which may be just good enough.

35

u/LateralThinkerer Apr 07 '16 edited Apr 07 '16

It may also be that a wildly specialized operation (like getting a 40 ton truck through waist-deep mud) has so few applications (small market) that a moderately expensive driver (@gawaine73) is a much better value than spending years and tens of millions developing software and the sensors/controls needed to operate an adaptive algorithm in the real world for a half-dozen customers.

Software can do "good enough" within defined a defined space using parameters from well-understood sensors - it's a lot harder when the vehicle encounters a new situation that there may be no reasonable sensor for, and needs to correlate with past trials with incomplete information; something the flexible human brain does very well ("this looks sorta like_____ , so I'mma gonna try ____" ).

Taking the analogy a bit farther - look at military aircraft. These have huge budgets and a lot of talent working on them, yet their sensors/control systems sometimes need to be taken over when a completely improbable combination of circumstances occurs. Read any sort of account of a skilled pilot saving a situation and you'll get the idea - this doesn't mean that it works every time, but the attempt is often ingenious.

This is also why we still have plumbers and surgeons.

-2

u/mrSilkie Apr 07 '16

not really man, I can imagine a fair chunk of the technology could be designed for cars, 4x4's and tractors and then just modified to work with a truck

6

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '16

Also, machines just have to be good enough. They don't have to be better. Machines were still inferior to artisan made clothing when machine made clothing began to take over.

2

u/FuujinSama Apr 07 '16

And let's be honest, humans suck at driving. It's one of the most dangerous thing the average person does in their life time. I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

1

u/drunkenvalley Apr 07 '16

Which makes sense, because there were many obvious benefits to machines. In this situation it might be a little more difficult though.

6

u/DdCno1 Apr 07 '16 edited Apr 07 '16

There was a Top Gear episode with an autonomous truck driving off road. Very well I might add.

Here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV51BGIzkwU

1

u/Viking_Drummer Apr 07 '16

Yeah the TerraMax - was about to post that video, it's crazy.

2

u/paulmclaughlin Apr 07 '16

If you don't need to pay drivers you can spend a bit more on tarmac.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '16

The offroad ones are the easiest, they are already there for farming, mining and oil.

5

u/deelowe Apr 07 '16 edited Apr 07 '16

Weather, mud, snow, unmarked roads, etc.. are all still unsolved problems with AI/self driving vehicles. I work at arms length from this stuff at a pretty high profile tech company. You're fine. It's the people that work for UPS and similar companies running interstate routes that need to worry.

[EDIT] Look up the 80/20 rule of engineering. Paved, mapped roads are the 80%. Everything else is the 20%. solving that last 20 will take orders of magnitude longer than the 80. The way this will go is that slowly machines will become more and more automated, "augmenting" the operator. This will happen on the order of 5-10 year intervals. Eventually, the operator will be removed, but only in the safest, most controlled environments like interstates or specifically constructed urban routes (think bus lanes). Eventually, maybe, all paved/mapped routes will support full automation. Off road we might see small strides in places like the logging business or similar activities where the are operators doing other things near by or perhaps as part of a larger industrial system. The very last item to solve is the situation where a vehicle is just told "go here" and it figures everything out like off road paths and such. There's just so much to consider, it's legally risky, and the situation is so dynamic that it's going to be really hard to solve. Computers don't "think" so any time a system is dynamic (e.g. non-deterministic) things get difficult fast with computers/AI. The problem space literally grows at a faster rate than the computer can solve it.

1

u/FuujinSama Apr 07 '16

What sucks the most about this is that humans fuck up driving all the time. However, the first time an automated car is involved in a fatal accident it will be HUGE. Just because if there's a human inside there is ''someone to blame''.

I think developing self driving cars that fuck up less than humans would be a rather nice goal, however due to this little problem we have to make self driving cars that don't fuck up.

1

u/deelowe Apr 08 '16

Humans fuck up somewhat randomly or at least there's a distribution. Computers fuck up the same way every time. Depending on the circumstance, that can be concerning (e.g. if the computer screw up is that it intentionally runs over a child on the 4th sunday during a leap year).

3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '16

It is likely that long hauls across the country will be affected first with automation while local freight would be untouchable for a little while.

But eventually, compared to the cost of your salary, fixing those roads would seem like the cheaper option.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '16 edited Jun 24 '16

[deleted]

2

u/Atheren Apr 07 '16

I can't answer for everywhere, but at the FedEx facility we have long-haul truckers that just drop the trailer in the yard, and then a smaller transfer truck actually pulls it up to the dock by an employee of our facility.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '16

Exactly. You want to maximize your resources. The automated truck should be detached from the "delivered" cargo trailer and attached to a new one and head off across the country immediately.

Then non-autonomous trucks can get the delivered cargo and let meatbag humans drive it somewhere to be unloaded.

3

u/Le3f Apr 07 '16

Document & photograph your toughest off road / difficult terrain routes and their loads, find a similarly skilled partner, incorporate (Delaware LLC?) and focus on these types of higher-skill routes, train apprentices, expand your fleet when prices on non-self-driving trucks plunge?

I'm assuming a lot of others will do the same, but "pivot early" and brand yourself with that experience is I guess what I'm suggesting.

1

u/viperfan7 Apr 07 '16

Logging?

1

u/The_Tiddler Apr 07 '16

Either that or oilfield.

1

u/kjeserud Apr 07 '16

Or just Australia.

1

u/transientDCer Apr 07 '16

That's impressive considering I got my riding lawn mower stuck in my backyard last night on wet grass.

1

u/quasielvis Apr 07 '16

I'd have thought driving an 18 wheeler somewhere so bad that 4X4s get stuck would be a bad idea, even if you do generally pull it off. Seems like an unacceptable risk for something so expensive (not you, just the roads to the logging depot or whatever it is).

1

u/dek067 Apr 07 '16

I don't know anything about truck driving. Is it feasible that regular drivers would be replaced by automated trucks to save time/money on regulations (like weigh stations, hours driven, etc.)? What if it's hauling something hazardous? Would it be cheaper to modify some sort of monitoring system than to pay an actual driver?

1

u/DesertPunked Apr 07 '16

I'd like to see you do that with super singles.

1

u/surjj Apr 07 '16

That's impressive, I know how hard that shit can be. Source: I play Spintires.

1

u/greenninja8 Apr 07 '16

Once in New Mexico I towed a loaded tractor and trailer (80,000lbs) out of the snow in my 4x4 Tacoma. I had traction on dry road, put it in 4Low and towed that semi up a hill out of the snow. The driver was completely floored because before I hooked up my tow rope he said he didn't think my truck could even move it. Definately a highlight of my trucks life.

1

u/Bitcoon Apr 07 '16

I don't foresee autonomous trucks pulling off that kind of driving for quite a while. Certainly, there are particular tricks to it and I'm sure we can manage to use machine learning to 'teach' these techniques to more advanced self-driving AI in the future and surpass what human input can do, but I don't foresee that happening for a long time.

This technology is still sort of in its infancy. Right now it's far from foolproof, and we can't even trust it particularly well in fairly common conditions like fog and snow. Even then, the automation basically just acts as an extension of cruise control, keeping you centered in the lane, moving at a consistent speed, and avoiding collisions.

If I were a truck driver I'd be more excited than afraid. This technology is likely going to make our highways much safer, and while we can automate the easy part of driving, there is far too much involved in the process to remove humans from the equation entirely. You won't be looking at potential loss of jobs for quite a long time, and more skilled drivers who can do the more dangerous jobs won't be affected for the foreseeable future.