Fully Autonomous Truck Yard Operational in Texas
ISEE, a technology company researching automatic driving for commercial vehicles, has announced that it is working with an unnamed Fortune 100 customer in Texas and has a fully autonomous truck yard operating. What are the implications?
Details
With 1.7 million square feet and 750 different trucking bays, the facility is able to buzz with work day or night.
“The autonomous truck yard represents a significant milestone in the advancement of transportation logistics. By harnessing the power of AI, machine learning, and computer vision, ISEE has created and deployed a fully autonomous system that streamlines the yard movement of trailers and containers to reduce costs, improve safety, and give companies staffing predictability amidst ongoing labor shortages” ISEE says in its formal announcement.
There is one interesting caveat with this news, however: the trucks in question are all very small. This enables more maneuverability around the lot but leaves a bit to be desired in more real-life practical applications. It is highly likely that once an automated truck gets a load, it attaches it to a much larger truck with a human driver for it to go on its journey of many miles.
Conclusion
It will probably take another decade at the bare minimum before this technology scales to larger, less flexible trucks. As such, there will still be the need for human drivers to get things to and from distribution centers, even if 100% of all truck yards became fully autonomous overnight.
This is part of why we have good reason to believe that human trucking will not go away any time soon. The most likely outcome is that a trucker will be used for common street traffic, while autonomous technology takes to the highway and smaller trucks pull at the truck yards. This would improve the work-life balance of truckers, enabling them to stay within a 100-mile radius of their home rather than traveling across the entire span of the United States. If this is the future for the trucking industry, it sounds like an improvement for everyone involved.
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