As legal battles continues to surround Uber’s Otto, Volvo has silently made progress in developing self-driving trucks. It just recently revealed an autonomous garbage truck, and now has a autonomous steering system developed for an extremely specific task. Volvo developed a self-steering truck to assist Brazilian sugarcane farmers protect their crops.
When it’s being culled, sugarcane is moved from a harvester to trucks that drive together with rows of plants-but human motorists typically run over those plants by accident. That destroys around four percent of the crop every season, as per Volvo. While farmers saw this as an inconvenience, Volvo viewed it as a chance to check out new innovation. It constructed a prototype truck that steers itself, while the motorist uses the throttle and brakes or cruise control to preserve proper speed.
The system utilizes GPS receivers to steer the truck by comparing its position to coordinates on a digital map. Two gyroscopes likewise assist the automobile orient itself. Volvo declares the system is so accurate that it will not permit the truck to deviate over 25 millimeters (0.9 inch) off course.
Over the summertime, Volvo prepares to release more self-steering trucks in order to establish the system. It does prepare to make autonomous steering commercially offered “in the foreseeable future,” and will continue to make fully-autonomous vehicles as well. Like Tesla and its Autosteer system, Volvo could used automatic steering as a stepping stone to complete autonomy.
Autonomous trucks could have a huge influence on transportation, both favorable and unfavorable. Because they are incapable of being sidetracked, self-driving trucks may show much safer than human-driven vehicles, and getting rid of human motorists will decrease operating costs. But they could also create economic havoc by cutting jobs, and face the same regulative questions as autonomous vehicles. Such issues have to be addressed.
