LiDAR vision – Helping bring autonomous trucks to your neighborhood
“Truck-truckin’ down the highway
Sittin’ in the cab of
A ten ton machine”
The rock group, Bread, came up with this song 7 years before the Enterprise was hauled to the Marshall Flight Center in Alabama (Figure 1) for its maiden flight. It is highly unlikely that an autonomous truck is going to do something like this even a century from now. But bringing autonomy to trucks for logistics and movement of goods has received increased focus over the past 3 years and is becoming real. According to Richard Bishop, an autonomous trucking expert, the primary factors driving this include driver fatigue and health, COVID-19, and the more immediate financial benefits that can accrue with autonomous trucking (as compared to autonomous cars). Ever since Otto (later acquired by Uber for ~ $500M) made the first autonomous trucking run on a Colorado highway to transport 51,744 cans of beer (@$10K/can, must have been excellent!), significant financial investments have been made – in start-ups and unicorns like TuSimple, Embark, Kodiak, Gatik and Plus. Aurora and Waymo (which initially focused on autonomous cars) are aggressively pursuing this opportunity. OEMs like Daimler, Volvo, and Navistar have allocated significant internal resources to make autonomous trucking a reality. Amazon, UPS, and FedEx have joined the battle since losing here is an existential threat.