LIDAR and Trucking Safety

 HOW LIDAR TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES TRUCKING SAFETY   in LIDAR News

October 30, 2022 

Trucking is a lifeline between consumers and products. The logistics industry helps transit everything from essential items like medicine to Amazon prime products. Yet, one of the leading causes of mass-casualty highway accidents are those involving trucks and freighters. 

Though many truckers are highly trained, sometimes the negligence of other drivers in cars and other vehicles can result in an unavoidable disaster. Other factors, such as weather, truck maintenance, and road distractions are also commonly at play. 

LiDar technology can prevent accidents by enabling autonomous trucks and smart highways. Read on to discover how LiDAR technology is helping make transportation safer and more efficient. 

LiDAR Vision and Autonomous Trucks

LiDAR technology, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, uses laser technology to gather a 3D data model around a vehicle in real time. This data allows autonomous vehicles to sense their surroundings at all times by allowing them to “see” objects such as pedestrians, cars, and road construction. 

Since the blind-spots in trucks are much larger, big rigs require stronger perception sensors in greater quantities. The concept of “perception” as it pertains to LiDAR technology involves the ability to sense other vehicles, as well as lane markers, traffic lights and signs, accidents, and countless other road features. 

The main challenge when using LiDAR technology in trucking is ensuring that the driver has an ample Field of View for any range of potential hazards. Now, a mix of long-range and short-range 360-degree LiDAR sensors are mounted on the mirrors of vehicles, typically with careful attention needed for larger vehicles that are subject to higher-impact loads. 

The rollout of 5G will increase LiDAR technology’s latency, or processing speed, making the 3D data model even more accurate. This is one of the main reasons why 5G’s rollout is paving the way for fully autonomous vehicles. ... ' 

Visibility Can Ease the Pain of Long Chassis Return Times

Made me think the process again.

How Visibility Can Ease the Pain of Long Chassis Return Times

August 26, 2022

By William Sandoval, SCB Contributor, in SupplyChainBrain

After a year of steady increases in freight prices, the U.S. trucking industry is experiencing a cooldown in demand, with linehaul rates declining significantly from their highs at the start of 2022. Trucking capacity has loosened considerably, thanks to new space entering the system, and a plateauing of consumer demand across major geographic markets.

The rise in trucking capacity also has to do with an improvement in efficiency across different nodes in the end-to-end supply chain, be it at ports, intermodal yards or warehouses. Transportation networks work in partnership, meaning that any tangible improvement in efficiency within one logistics segment has ripple effects on the efficiency of other segments.

As throughput across ports, intermodal yards and warehouses improved this year, the long truck queues outside their gates started dwindling, reducing idling times. This enabled drivers to keep their trucks moving for a longer duration within their allotted hours of service (HOS), directly increasing capacity availability without injecting fresh capacity into the system.

That said, the trucking industry is still far from solving some of its deepest challenges since the pandemic, such as the shortage of intermodal chassis in circulation. This bottleneck continues to tighten, threatening to set off a vicious cycle of delays throughout the logistics pipeline.

The industry isn’t suffering from an actual physical shortage of chassis. Instead, the current situation is a reflection of logjams that have persisted for a while, caused by a failure to optimize chassis usage. Chassis turnover days are a lynchpin metric that determines the health of the trucking economy, with higher numbers indicating a fall in efficiency.

TRAC Intermodal, the largest marine chassis provider in the U.S., reports a threefold increase in wait times for truckers to return chassis, compared with the pre-pandemic normal. This has an enormous impact on chassis availability. For fleets, increasing capital investment in procuring new chassis will also not be enough, considering the holdups in the system that will only continue to accumulate in the absence of serious optimization.

The headwinds to movement come from the railroad segment as well. The U.S. rail industry is seeing massive congestion across intermodal hubs such as Chicago and Joliet, with trains backed up for miles around their destinations. With the peak season approaching, shippers eager to front-load their inventories will cause an even greater surge in demand for capacity. 

This would add more burden to an already precarious situation. One common reason for delays in chassis returns is the truckers themselves. Stuck in long queues outside intermodal hubs and warehouses, they prefer to “drop and hook” their chassis, reducing the hassle of waiting for the containers to be off-loaded.

But with warehouses swimming in excess containers and struggling with historically low space availability, containers sit longer atop chassis, rendering the chassis non-operational for that duration. As warehouses continued to reel under space and labor shortage, container-bound chassis keep piling outside their gates, drastically increasing chassis turnover times. 

While fleets focus on leveraging drop-and-hook as a way to maximize their driver hours, it often comes at the expense of fleet utilization. With the industry being cyclical, the burden of delayed chassis inevitably comes back to hurt the fortunes of fleet businesses, as they scramble to find an empty chassis to haul the freight they signed up for.   .... ' 

No Driver on Board: Autonomous Trucks to Take to the Road

 Evan Ackerman presents a good overview of the state of autonomous trucking.   Door to door, with lots of links to background information.    This should get us lots of further useful data about operational experiences. (ie accidents)  and the implications.     Having worked in trucking industry HR management and optimization, can see there will be big changes.

This Year, Autonomous Trucks Will Take to the Road With No One on Board

The startup TuSimple is deploying tractor-trailers that drive themselves from pickup to delivery

By Evan Ackerman  in IEEE Spectrum

Companies like Tesla, Uber, Cruise, and Waymo promise a future where cars are essentially mobile robots that can take us anywhere with a few taps on a smartphone. But a new category of vehicles is about to overtake self-driving cars in that leap into the future. Autonomous trucks have been quietly making just as much, if not more, progress toward commercial deployment, and their impact on the transportation of goods will no doubt be profound.

Among nearly a dozen companies developing autonomous trucking, San Diego–based TuSimple is trying to get ahead by combining unique technology with a series of strategic partnerships. ... "

Full Truck Alliance: Uber Like Trucking

Full Truck Alliance, a Chinese startup which provides an Uber-like service for the trucking industry, raises $1.7B, source says at a ~$12B valuation (Lulu Yilun Chen/Bloomberg)

Lulu Yilun Chen / in Bloomberg:

Full Truck Alliance, a Chinese startup which provides an Uber-like service for the trucking industry, raises $1.7B, source says at a ~$12B valuation  —  - Investors in the round include Tencent, Jack Ma's Yunfeng  — Full Truck Alliance one of the largest in SoftBank's portfolio   ... " 

Delivering Butter, Autonomously

Had no 'disengagements' that required the self-driving system needed to be interrupted.

A Self-Driving Truck Delivered Butter from California to Pennsylvania in Three Days
The Mercury News
Levi Sumagaysay in MercuryNews 

Startup Plus.ai has completed what is being called the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck, a 2,800-mile-run from Tulare, CA, to Quakertown, PA, that took three days to deliver 40,000 pounds of butter for Land O'Lakes. A human safety driver was aboard the autonomous 18-wheeler to take over if needed, accompanied by a safety engineer. The company said the trip was a smooth one with zero "disengagements," which occur when a self-driving system has to be suspended because of a problem. Ten to 15 companies in the U.S. are working on autonomous freight delivery, said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, who believes the trucking industry will be the first to adopt autonomous technology on a mass scale. “When the trucks can go long distance, that's when there will be significant ROI (return on investment)   .... "

Wal-Mart Launches Freight and Payment Blockchain Network

Walmart continues work in the space.  Here again covering tracking, payment processing and dispute analysis.   Good example to track further.  More at the link.

Walmart launches ‘world’s largest’ blockchain-based freight-and-payment network
Walmart Canada's blockchain hits the sweet spot for the supply chain industry as it solves issues such as invoice dispute resolution and real-time data distribution.  By Lucas Mearian  in Computerworld

The Canadian division of Walmart has launched a blockchain-based supply chain that includes freight tracking and payment processing for 70 trucking companies whose goods are transported to more than 400 retail stores.

The system is now live and all of Walmart Canada's third-party freight carriers are scheduled to be on the network by Feb. 1, 2020, the company said in a statement. Walmart claims the blockchain network is the largest of its kind in the world, a claim not disputed by industry analysts. .... " 

Autonomous Trucking Startup iSee

Interesting effort which could change supply chain logistics.  Worried a bit about huge trucks flying around the road before we get it all right.   For more about the caution side of this I watched a recent Nova Program:  "Looks Who's Driving". See: https://www.pbs.org/video/look-whos-driving-65sadz/ .  Well done, and shows the complexity of the overall problem.

This autonomous trucking startup out of MIT wants computers to think like human drivers, and it just became the first self-driving truck investment for Founders Fund
By Megan Hernbroth   BusinessInsider.   Much more at the Link

iSee, an autonomous driving startup for trucks, announced $15 million in Series A funding from Founders Fund on Monday.

Unlike other autonomous driving and logistics startups, iSee uses proprietary deep learning and computer vision technology to try to give its trucks "common sense," an area that other technologies struggle to replicate. 

The startup is Founders Fund's first investment in the red-hot logistics sector. Still, partner Scott Nolan told Business Insider that the firm is investing in the iSee team and its technology specifically, not the larger trend.

The team is comprised of a notable computer research lab under cognitive science professor Josh Tenenbaum at MIT. Maintaining a high bar for new hires is one of the key challenges facing the team of former academics, Nolan said.  .... " 

Making the Road Easier

Seems this kind of assistance would be of value in many domains.

Life on the Road Easier as Truckers Adopt Digital Tech 
The Wall Street Journal
Angus Loten

Trucking, logistics, and supply-chain operators are adopting digital tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), to improve long-haul freight shipping. Fleet operator Hub Group has introduced AI-powered capabilities to ensure more efficient delivery and raise productivity; these capabilities exploit more than 10 million data points gathered by sensors and other equipment the company has been incorporating into its truck fleet over the past two years. Hub CIO Vava Dimond said the initiative hopes to mitigate truckers' paperwork burden with an app that tracks and automatically fills out route logs and proof of delivery notices. Older transportation companies are being pressured to modernize by developing platforms that combine various datasets to track orders, truck locations, and other vital information in real time, and boosting fuel expenditure and scheduling efficiency. ... " 

Hybrid Heavy Duty Trucks

More changes in supply chain options.

Engineers develop concept for hybrid heavy-duty trucks
Long-haul trucks with electric motors combined with gas-alcohol engines could slash pollution levels and greenhouse gases.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

Heavy-duty trucks, such as the 18-wheelers that transport many of the world’s goods from farm or factory to market, are virtually all powered by diesel engines. They account for a significant portion of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, but little has been done so far to curb their climate-change-inducing exhaust.

Now, researchers at MIT have devised a new way of powering these trucks that could drastically curb pollution, increase efficiency, and reduce or even eliminate their net greenhouse gas emissions.

The concept involves using a plug-in hybrid engine system, in which the truck would be primarily powered by batteries, but with a spark ignition engine (instead of a diesel engine). That engine, which would allow the trucks to conveniently travel the same distances as today’s conventional diesel trucks, would be a flex-fuel model that could run on pure gasoline, pure alcohol, or blends of these fuels.

While the ultimate goal would be to power trucks entirely with batteries, the researchers say, this flex-fuel hybrid option could provide a way for such trucks to gain early entry into the marketplace by overcoming concerns about limited range, cost, or the need for excessive battery weight to achieve longer range.  .... " 

Scenarios for Autonomous Trucking

Somewhat unexpected scenarios of process for autonomous trucking and the implications:

In SCDigest

Supply Chain News Bites
Supply Chain Graphic of the Week: The Six Most Likely Scenarios for Autonomous Trucks

Highway Exit-to-Exit Automation Tops the List, though Platooning has Few Barriers

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on new research from Steve Viscelli,with the headline news his estimate that the US will lose almost 300,000 long haul truck driver jobs over 25 years as the result of autonomous trucks - even if some (lower paid) local delivery driver jobs actually ctincrease. (See Will or Will not Autonomous Trucks Eliminate Huge Numbers of Truck Driver Jobs?)... "

Unilever Innovates with Trucking Supply Chain

 Trucking Startup Convoy Inks Its Biggest Deal With Unilever   by Dina Bass

Unilever contract involves 10s of thousands of trucks a year

Convoy Inc., a Seattle-based startup that aims to become an Uber for trucking, has struck its biggest deal yet -- with consumer goods giant Unilever NV. ... 

The four-year agreement will have Convoy connect Unilever to trucks for tens of thousands of shipments a year and is worth millions of dollars over the next year, Convoy Chief Executive Officer Dan Lewis said in an interview. Unilever, the company behind Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Lipton tea, chose Convoy over several other trucking technology providers, the company said. ... " 

Daimler Testing Automated Truck Driving

In the BBC:  More on Daimler's work on automated truck van driving.  Includes a number of images of conveyances and their technology.  Will be a considerable advance in supply chains, once all the details are worked out.

" ... Earlier this month, the automotive giant was granted the first licence ever to test such a vehicle on a public highway by the US state of Nevada.

Using a combination of GPS, radar and video cameras, the Freightliner Inspiration can drive by itself on open stretches of road, freeing a driver to take breaks, check his emails and even watch DVDs.

The catch is that a qualified person must remain in front of the wheel at all times so they can take control if something goes wrong.

However, proponents say that the technology, once perfected, will reduce accidents by lessening the chance of human error, boost productivity and cut emissions. ...  "

Mercedes Self Driving 18 Wheeler

In CWorld:  Concept Vehicle.  Impressive design.  This should have considerable influence on supply chain efficiency. Good detail in the article.

" ... Mercedes-Benz showed off an autonomous semi-trailer truck that will be available in a decade and allow long-haul drivers to relax and tend to paperwork and duties other than driving.
The Mercedes-Benz Future Truck 2025 was displayed at the 2014 International Commercial Vehicle show this month.

"In ten years' time, trucks could be driving autonomously on motorways. Transport efficiency will increase, traffic will be safer for all road users and fuel consumption and CO2 emissions will be further reduced," Mercedes said in a blog post. "Autonomous driving is already possible at realistic speeds and in realistic motorway traffic situations." ... "  

FleetRisk Advisors for Predictive Risk

At the recent Big Data and Analytics Summit I attended a talk and had a chat with Vikas Jain of FleetRisk Advisors.  I had worked some similar projects with several enterprises, so I knew the problem.  Using predictive analytics against behavior data to determine risk measures to support and improve fleet decisions. They seemed to have the problem well addressed, even providing services to a company I had previously worked with.   FleetRisk provides solutions to the trucking industry " ...  examines and aggregates thousands of data points across an organization to identify the root causes of likely events before they occur, helping companies anticipate future events and prevent them from taking place, such as driver accidents, employee turnover and workers' compensation claims ...".  I also like their answers to how these solutions were integrated with HR culture.  Give them a look.

Natural Gas and Commercial Trucking

An area I investigated several years ago.  MJ Perry examines.  While natural gas is now considerably cheaper and more energy efficient than gasoline today, commercial fleets have not been overhauled to use natural gas.    Nor have sufficient fueling points been established.  But that situation is changing. Another project has me looking at predictions of natural gas availability and cost.  The future of this fuel to drive commercial supply chains is bright.