Only by perfecting these "soft powers", combining the "hard power" of technology, and creating an ecosystem that can solve multi-faceted pain points and provide multi-faceted solutions can driverless trucks enter "thousands of households".
2021 is a lively year for the U.S. self-driving truck space.
In particular, in the last two months, a number of mainstream players have announced blockbuster information: either going public, or reaching new cooperation, or ushering in financing/product launch milestones. When will I "liberate" drivers in self-driving trucks? Detailed in this tweet.
As the saying goes, keep the best for last.
The biggest event of the year is tusson's Christmas present: On the evening of December 22, the leader in the field of self-driving trucks in the United States successfully completed the world's first unmanned test of driverless heavy trucks on public roads, without safety officers and any human intervention.
A driverless truck departed from a railroad port near Tucson City, Arizona, and after more than 80 miles of nighttime driving, it finally arrived safely at a large logistics distribution center near Phoenix. The entire process lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes, and the driverless truck demonstrated its ability to handle complex road conditions such as cities and highways, including traffic lights, up and down ramps, emergency lane vehicles and lane changes.
This fully unmanned test is a phased result of Tucson's future Driver Out Pilot Program, which has lasted more than a year and a half. The project, which will run until 2022, is dedicated to developing an unmanned system that meets the requirements of the L4 level and ensures its redundancy, reliability and stability to enable fully unmanned and safe operation on open roads. The tests were completely operated by Tucson Future's self-developed Autonomous Driving System, with no safety drivers in the car and no remote control of the vehicle and other traffic conditions. In order to ensure the public safety of all unmanned testing, Tucson will maintain close cooperation and communication with relevant government regulators and law enforcement agencies in the future, and equipped with safety and security vehicles to ensure the safety of fully unmanned testing operations.
Tucson's future realization of the world's first driverless heavy truck on the road is not only an important milestone in the field of self-driving trucks in the United States, but also an important milestone in the entire global autonomous driving field.
For Lu Cheng, future president and CEO of Tucson, this is a "breakthrough of 0 to 1". （TuSimple CEO Cheng Lu: “Driver Out” run was “0 to 1 moment”）
Lu Cheng, Future President and CEO of Tucson
Lu Cheng said that the realization of this milestone is like a drug passing the third stage of drug development by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA): the last hurdle before the drug is mass-produced and sold. For Tucson's future, it means more driverless heavy-duty trucks on the road, as well as more engineering and commercial operations.
Tucson has earlier reached a cooperation with Navistar, a U.S. heavy-duty truck manufacturer owned by TRATON Group, to start mass production of autonomous heavy-duty trucks in 2024. Lu Cheng said that in the coming period, one of the biggest challenges will be to complete a lot of engineering work.
"It's about the integration of the 'virtual driver' and the hardware that meets the requirements for mass production," Mr. Lu said. "The job over the next two years is to build a reliable, mass-produced, self-driving heavy-duty truck that uses mass-produced hardware."
In fact, to achieve the end of what Lu Cheng calls "using technology to solve and create low-cost, highly reliable freight capabilities", Tucson must have the most advanced software, virtual drivers, scalable and reliable hardware systems or hardware cooperation ecosystems in the future. Earlier this month, during CES 2022, we announced that deepening our strategic cooperation is part of the cooperation ecosystem. The two companies will design and develop a next-generation driverless domain controller (ADC) designed for the needs of L4-level driverless truck scenarios, equipped with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin (SoC), NVIDIA's latest generation of vehicle-grade AI chips.
This cooperation with NVIDIA will provide tucs with powerful computing power for Tucs' future driverless systems, and accelerate the process of Tucs' independent research and development of high-performance, vehicle-grade, and large-scale driverless domain controllers, while enhancing Tucs' control over ADC product development.
According to Cheng Lu, high-performance, mass-produced ADCs are one of the key elements for Tucs to achieve large-scale operations in Tucson's driverless freight networks (AFNs). "We are very much looking forward to working with Nvidia to personally participate in the development of the next generation of ADCs. This partnership will give Tucson a huge competitive advantage, further strengthen our leading position in the entire field of driverless trucks, and accelerate the commercialization process of driverless vehicles," he said.
Of course, achieving from 0 to 1 may require "hard power", and to achieve from 1 to 10, I am afraid that more "soft power" is needed. ”
This is also the conclusion I came to after communicating with Lu Cheng. Anyone can do "stacking", "stacking people" or "stacking products", but the real realization of large-scale automatic driving heavy trucks on the road actually requires a "soft and hard combination" overall solution.
Tucson's driverless freight network is one of the "killer tools" of Tucson's future overall solution.
Tucson Future Existing (Green Line) and Next Phase (Purple Line) Driverless Freight Network (AFN)
Launched in July 2020, Tucson's driverless freight network consists of driverless trucks, logistics hubs, and operations monitoring systems that now cover multiple hub cities in Arizona, Texas, Florida, and other states, with plans to expand to major transportation routes in 48 U.S. states by 2024. The entire network now covers about 10,000 miles and will eventually cover about 47,000 miles of the entire U.S. interstate highway system.
"Tucson's driverless freight network is like a virtual railway, consisting of multiple routes that have been drawn and updated at any time," Lu Cheng told AutoXing. "The larger the network, the higher the density, and the more logistics hubs connected, the easier it is for more self-driving trucks to hit the road." The entire network standardizes corresponding facilities such as hub center setup, truck access space design, operations supervision, refueling solutions, docking between driver and truck, relay stations, etc. ”
Lu Cheng believes that there must be a set of overall solutions for driverless heavy trucks on the road, and being able to achieve unmanned driving from a technical point of view is only the first step. "We realized that we needed to build a freight ecosystem that combines logistics hub centers, routes, customers, and multiple links to achieve the promotion of large-scale driverless heavy trucks," he said.
Speaking of "soft power", it is necessary to mention Tucson's future security framework. I also detailed the "2+6" safety framework behind Tucson's future world's first driverless truck on the road. "2+6" represents two safety principles and six safety standards. This safety framework is based on existing regulations and automotive industry-related technologies and safety-critical system best practices, combined with the V model commonly used in safety-critical industries and the agile design model commonly used by technology companies. This holistic security approach covers the company's organization, processes, technology and operations, not only ensuring reliability and safety, but also enabling it to demonstrate the technical and operational maturity of a fully unmanned pilot project.
Recently, Tucson Future announced two initiatives related to "soft power".
The first is to solve the pain points of the refueling link. U.S. Class 8 heavy-duty trucks typically come with 200-gallon fuel tanks that allow vehicles to travel up to 1,500 miles, meaning that they only need to stop once to refuel from the East Coast to the West Coast. But when there are no drivers, you must be well prepared for a variety of situations, especially interstate transportation over long distances that require intermediate refueling. Autonomous heavy trucks need to decide for themselves when and where to refuel along the way. To this end, Tucson future special application and obtained a patent: the vehicle automatically selects the method, equipment and system of the refueling station. The patent describes a dynamic refueling solution based on real-time use cases and performance for autonomous trucks, including an on-board computer that monitors fuel consumption and refueling needs in real time. This on-board computer interacts in real time with the surrounding network of gas stations and automatically selects the best refueling station for the vehicle based on its current operating status. This data-driven system can cut more costs and bring more convenience to users.
Another initiative is to partner with Hillwood, one of the largest industrial and commercial real estate developers in the United States, to develop existing and future properties adapted to self-driving trucks and integrate corresponding standards for Tucson's future infrastructure to help expand Tucson's future driverless freight network. Hillwood's 1 million-square-foot advanced base in its 27,000-acre AllianceTexas development in Fort Worth, Texas, will be the first to serve as the originating and receiving platform for self-driving trucks dedicated to Tucson's future use. In June 2021, Tucson Future officially opened a 2.5-acre logistics hub in the AllianceTexas Innovation Zone, creating 50 jobs for the local area.
Lu Cheng told AutoXing that he is confident that Tucson can achieve large-scale deployment of driverless freight in the United States by 2024 in the future.
I believe this confidence comes not only from Tucson's "hard power" to achieve driverless heavy trucks on the road from 0 to 1 in the future, but also from the "soft power" of more technologies than driverless freight networks, safety frameworks, refueling patents and cooperation with real estate developers. Only by perfecting these "soft powers", combining the "hard power" of technology, and creating an ecosystem that can solve multi-faceted pain points and provide multi-faceted solutions can driverless trucks enter "thousands of households".