Autonomous, light-duty trucks can now be used for commercial purposes on public roads in California. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles announced the proposal Tuesday, which outlines a permitting process for companies wishing to test or deploy driverless trucks for commercial use.
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Self-driving truck company TuSimple announced its autonomous technology reduced fuel consumption for trips by its prototype heavy-duty trucks by at least 10% compared with manually driven trucks.
The company's smallest lidar sensor to date, the Velabit carries some solid specifications in a form factor that's impressively tiny. That's quite the small form factor, and this footprint gives Velodyne the chance to use these sensors on vehicles that aren't necessarily full-on cars. In mid-2019, we learned that Nikon will help Velodyne build its sensors, so perhaps that's what Velodyne is talking about here.
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“There’s a lot of racks for hardware in there,” Lindgren said. Five computers host software and feedback control logic for actuation, recording up to 1 terabyte (TB) of data per hour of driving. A global navigation satellite system with an inertial measurement unit combined with a LiDAR point cloud on a high-definition map provides location accuracy to within a centimeter. “We’re using this as a test bed to try out different sensors and LiDAR,” Lindgren said.
Alphabet Inc.' s Waymo took a big step forward last fall when it began ferrying riders around the Phoenix area in robotaxis without human safety drivers. Humans have been behind the wheel for almost all of the 20 million miles of testing the company says it's completed on public roads.
Meanwhile Cruise states Driverless Safety is broken!
Waymo said Thursday it will begin mapping and eventually testing its autonomous long-haul trucks in Texas and parts of New Mexico, the latest sign that the Alphabet company is expanding beyond its core focus of launching a robotaxi business.
The automaker’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary, Cruise, unveiled a self-driving shuttle prototype on Tuesday in San Francisco, and it doesn’t have a steering wheel, foot pedals or any driver controls -- just seating for six accessed through large sliding doors.
Waymo will start delivering parcels for UPS using its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in Phoenix as part of a broader partnership with the shipping and logistics company.
Headed into 2020, self-driving cars are a disappointment relative to expectations. They were supposed to be dominating the roads by now, but the delay doesn’t change the ultimate impact self-driving cars will have. The hype also naturally drives short-term expectations because investors are impatient. Except now we know that companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple really did change everything.
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TuSimple, a global autonomous-driving technology company, has expanded autonomous truck service for current customer UPS to 20 trips per week. The company also added a route between Phoenix, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas. The company said 10 runs per week are on the new route; the other 10 runs are on an established route between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.
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