A fully driverless commercial operation has been initiated by a Canadian food and pharmacy retailer, Loblaw Companies Limited. Loblaw is using autonomous middle mile logistics company Gatik to deliver select online grocery orders with a fleet of multi-temperature autonomous box trucks. Gatik’s fully driverless deployment today represents the first time that an autonomous trucking company has removed the safety driver from a daily delivery route in Canada, which enables Loblaw to operate more routes and make more frequent trips.
Since January 2020, Loblaw and Gatik have transported more than 150,000 autonomous deliveries (with a safety driver on board), with a 100 percent safety record. Loblaw commissioned a third-party safety review of Gatik’s autonomous technology and approach for safe and secure operations. The review assessed the end-to-end technology solution and included sending degraded/incorrect sensor data, GPS jamming/spoofing, incorrect acceleration with objects in front.
On the other hand
However, autonomous vehicles are gaining naysayers, including Pronto CEO Anthony Levandowski, who is known as a pioneer in the industry, according to Bloomberg News. Recently, the publication ran the headline, “Self-Driving Cars Are Starting to Look Like a $100 Billion Bust.”
“Driverless car engineer Levandowski says truly autonomous vehicles are years — if not decades — away. So he’s focused on applications in the here and now, including delivering solutions for the mining and trucking industries,” Bloomberg‘s Max Chafkin reports.
Levandowski, who is also the founder of Pollen Mobile, is developing a technology for making vehicles drive themselves, starting with the off road market in quarries, mines and other places that are not accessible to the public. Pronto’s first product, autonomous haulage, is for trucks that move material from the mine to the processing plant.
The next project will be a driver-assist system for semi trucks. “We’re not there to replace the driver; we’re there to make their lives easier and safer,” Levandowski told Bloomberg. In February, Pronto announced that it was providing autonomous and advanced driver-assistance solutions to Bell Trucks America, Inc.
And Yet
The trucking industry is still gearing up for the driverless future. On September 22, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance approved an inspection procedure for autonomous commercial motor vehicles at its Annual Conference and Exhibition, in Rapid City, SD. The association is partnering with autonomous trucking providers, including Embark, Kodiak, Locomation, Torc Robotics, TuSimple, Plus, and Waymo.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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