Self-driving lorries hit the road in Sweden
Barrelling down a motorway south of Stockholm in a 40-tonne lorry and trailer, the driver keeps a careful eye on the road but, jarringly, no hands on the wheel. Instead, the truck drives itself, and veteran driver Roger Nordqvist is at the ready only in case of unexpected problems.
Swedish truck maker Scania is not the only auto manufacturer developing autonomous vehicles, but it recently became the first in Europe to pilot them while delivering commercial goods.
“We take their goods from point A, drive them to point B, fully autonomously,” Peter Hafmar, head of autonomous solutions at Scania, tells AFP outside the company’s transport lab in Sodertalje, south of Stockholm.
In the pilot project, the self-driving truck is manoeuvring a stretch of some 300 kilometres (186 miles) between Sodertalje and Jonkoping in Sweden’s south, delivering fast-food goods.
From the outside, the vehicle looks almost like any other lorry, save for a rail on the roof packed with cameras and two sensors resembling bug antennae on the sides.
Inside the cab, the wheel and seats are where you’d expect to find them, but small devices and screens dot the dashboard and a nest of wires run to the computer rack housed behind the passenger seat.
Engineer Goran Fjallid sits next to the safety driver in the passenger’s seat, eyes glued to his laptop as it receives video from the truck’s cameras and flickering text with information about what the vehicle is seeing.
A second screen shows a 3D-visualisation of the truck on the road and all nearby vehicles. The lorry combines all the input from the various sensors with a GPS system, with the different technologies acting as back-ups for each other.
“If the road markings disappear for a while, then it will use the GPS and it stays perfectly in its lane,” Fjallid explains But he acknowledges that a lot of trial and error has gone into getting the truck to that point.
They’ve had to tweak things like how the truck handles merging onto the motorway, and what to do when another car cuts in front of it.
Every time the truck does something unexpected, such as braking or slowing down for no apparent reason, Fjallid makes a note of the exact timing so the logs and data can be examined. The lorry’s sensors are also calibrated daily before hitting the road.
Hafmar says there are still some hurdles to clear before driverless trucks — without safety drivers — become a common sight on roads, both in terms of technology and legislation. They expect to have this ready by the end of the 2020s or the beginning of 2030s, Hafmar says.
The advent of self-driving trucks can be seen as a threat to the jobs of truck drivers — one of the world’s most common professions. But Hafmar insists autonomous vehicles are needed to address a global driver shortage.
Source: eNCA
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