Autonomous Trucking: The Road to Mass Deployment

By Dr. Anurag Ganguli, Head of R&D at Plus

Autonomous trucks will bring transformational impacts to the transportation and logistics industry. Plus is following a two-part strategy to develop Level 4 driverless trucks. Part one of the strategy involves deploying a highly automated driver-in product at scale in the near term, providing substantial benefits immediately. Part two of the strategy is to leverage the data from the billions of real-world miles collected from part one to continuously improve and validate the readiness of the technology for a driverless deployment.

We will discuss these strategies and more at NVIDIA GTC on November 9. Register free today: link.

Current Value Propositions

The value propositions of a highly automated driver-in product include fuel savings as well as reduced carbon emissions, increased driver comfort, and overall improved safety. For example, two separate controlled studies Plus conducted with key customers showed fuel savings of around 10 percent over a manual baseline. In another user study conducted with third-party drivers, the user responses indicated that features such as stop-and-go and merge handling are key to enhancing driver comfort and a differentiator that can help improve truck driver recruitment and retention.

Innovations for Scalability

Deploying a highly automated driver-in complex product commercially at scale requires innovations in multiple areas. The sensor system design and placement should be optimized for cost and performance at the same time. On the software side, choosing the right automotive-grade computational platform is important. Other technology innovations include auto-calibration, self-healing, scalable mapping, and data management for different fleets with varying requirements, learning from all of the collected data.

Be sure to attend our NVIDIA GTC session, “The Road to Mass Deployment” on November 9 to learn more.