In the summer of 1995, two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University left Pittsburgh on a cross-country road trip in a 1990 Pontiac TransSport minivan modified in one important way: Its primary driver was a computer system named RALPH, short for Rapidly Adapting Lateral Position Handler. A camera below the rearview mirror scoped out the road ahead, recognizing images, such as lane markings. A UNIX computer between the front seats analyzed the images and relayed instructions to an electric motor that moved the steering wheel.
The researchers handled the throttle and brake and stepped in when RALPH veered off course, which wasn’t often. RALPH safely steered 98% of the 3,000-mile journey to Los Angeles — a nine-day trip that included stops to see an 8,000 lb. prairie dog, a power glitch that shut down the computer, bad weather in the mountains and a wedding vow renewal in Las Vegas.
The so-called “No Hands Across America” tour was one of the earliest demonstrations of the potential of autonomous mobile systems, which have come a long way since. Driver-assist technologies, such as emergency braking, lane centering and blind spot detection are widely available in vehicles today. And Pittsburgh has emerged as a leader in developing autonomous mobile technologies, including higher-level systems capable of operating on their own that are poised to revolutionize entire industries.
Few industries are expected to feel the impact of the shift to autonomous systems more than long-haul trucking.
“The big benefit for an autonomous truck is you do not need the expense of a driver,” said Philip Koopman, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who has been studying self-driving car safety for more than 25 years. “The computer doesn't need to sleep. You can just go, go, go.”
Critical hurdles remain. While it’s now legal for driverless trucks to pull out onto Pennsylvania roads, the thought of an 18-wheeler without a human behind the wheel makes people nervous. Public research polls show most U.S. drivers have some degree of fear or uncertainty sharing the road with a driverless vehicle. The autonomous system can’t drink and drive or get sleepy, but computers are not error-proof. “People keep saying it's going to make things safer, but nobody knows how that will turn out,” Koopman said.
Pennsylvania is mapping a road forward, developing a major autonomous systems testing campus adjacent to the RIDC Westmoreland industrial park at the former Sony plant near New Stanton.
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh-based Aurora Innovations is about to embark on a major demonstration of how capable driverless trucks are in real-world conditions. By the end of the year, the seven-year-old company plans to send 20 of its driverless trucks hauling freight at 65 miles per hour down a stretch of interstate between Dallas and Houston without a human driver in the jump seat.
The tech
When a computer operates a truck, it needs to get a sense of the outside world. To do that it calls on things like cameras, lasers, radar, or Lidar, which is a kind of laser radar to detect objects and build a model of the environment outside of the truck.
“So, it says, all right, these sensors, the cameras and the other things are telling me there's a car ahead of me,” Koopman said. “There's a tree at the side of the road. Here's where the road is. And so, it builds this sort of model, just like in a computer game. If you're playing a computer game and you see a house and you see a tree, the computer driver is building a model just like that. And then it uses that to decide how to move the truck. It steers the wheels in, it accelerates, and it breaks, in response to what it sees about the outside world.”
Autonomous systems are made up of many different technologies synced together to form what’s called a “stack.” The stack includes the underlying technology like sensors that let a system see what’s out there, tools like machine learning that take the information and make intelligent decisions and other technology that helps the system manage a particular function.
For Aurora, it’s the stack that’s behind the company’s Aurora Driver system. On the hardware side, it’s a system of cameras, radar, Lidar and a proprietary light called First Light. It allows the driver to see much farther up the road going highway speeds than human eyes or cameras. So, it can quickly make more informed decisions if it spots an object ahead, according to Gerardo Interiano, senior vice president of government relations and public affairs at Aurora.
“On the roads in Texas, we sometimes see people walking on the side of the highway,” Interiano said. “And we can see that individual, whether it's during the day or in the evening. And we can make a decision to change lanes and avoid even being close to that individual and avoid those accidents that sometimes happen in the middle of the night.”
Aurora has been testing their driverless trucks for more than seven years on test tracks and on the open road with a safety driver at hand.
Gathering mountains of data on how autonomous systems operate in real-world scenarios is crucial to the development of the technologies. Pennsylvania has taken a major step forward in advancing that research with its investment in the PennSTART campus in Westmoreland County — a testing ground for emergency responders and emerging transportation technology that’s in the process of being designed and could start construction as early as 2025 .
“What's different really here in Pennsylvania is we have a lot of hills and some challenging weather,” said Derrick Herrmann, chief of PennDOT’s transformational technology division. “There's a reason a lot of these companies have targeted Texas and kind of the Sunbelt states as their first deployments. They're definitely less challenging.”
At PennSTART, driverless trucks could navigate hazards in mock work zones, drive through fog, snow and ice and different types of pavement markings, gathering critical data for the companies and for the government agency responsible for the state’s roads. Hermann said several users are interested in using the track, such as Stack AV, another local driverless trucking company.
The safety
Aurora has tested on test tracks, simulation and on the road with a safety driver to learn how to respond to a comprehensive catalog of objects, scenarios and rare events. “Our technology is always paying attention,” Interiano said. “It's always gathering information around it. And it's trying to ensure that the things that we as humans sometimes get distracted by don't happen.”
The challenge for Aurora and other AV companies is making sure that list is complete, accounting for a spectrum of road conditions like black ice or shifting natural disasters like a wildfire. More miles on the road, mean more weird encounters for the tech to decipher. “The problem is when it sees something it's not been trained on, it has no idea,” Koopman said. “So if it sees another car, great. When it sees the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, does it know it's a car?”
In July 2023, a law went into effect making driverless trucks legal on the open road in Pennsylvania. But PennDOT is still working on what the certification process would look like for a company to take advantage of it. Herrmann expects it to be finalized by this fall.
But regulations for autonomous trucks with a safety driver on board are already on the books. It’s a self-certification process. The company has to make a safety management plan that includes how they’d handle a variety of incidents on the road, how responders would deal with their vehicles or how they’d respond to different traffic conditions, speed limits or work zones. If PennDOT thinks it’s satisfactory, they give them a certificate of compliance and they’re free to merge onto the highway.
Aurora has been working alongside PennDOT as they develop its new regulations. Both sides say the relationship has been transparent so far. “I think that some people may have a perspective that this is the wild, wild West,” Interiano said. “And the reality is, it's not. We are a heavily regulated industry.”
The road ahead
There are 3 million large trucks driving on roads across the U.S. today. Autonomous mobile systems are projected to be a boon in the coming years for the global economy — and to regions able to grab a share of the market. By 2026, the global market for land-based systems, including those used in trucking, would be more than $800 billion, according to a recent TEConomy Partners report commissioned by the Regional Industrial Development Corporation. When aerial, marine and defense autonomous systems were added, the market climbed above $1 trillion. Capturing one percent of that market could bring $10 billion over five-plus years and an estimated 5,000 jobs to a region with the technology stack required by such systems.
The Pittsburgh region is considered “one of the distinct hubs for autonomous systems activity in the country,” according to the TEConomy Partners report, and is well-positioned to seize a share of that lucrative market.
For now, there’s no signs that point to sweeping job losses for truck drivers. Autonomous long haul trucking is projected to add 26,400 to 35,100 new jobs each year to the U.S. job market, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Aurora is working with community colleges across the country to develop curriculum to get students for some of these new jobs. “We're literally preparing the next generation of mechanics,” Interiano said. “At the end of the day, we strongly believe that the trucking industry is going to need both human drivers and autonomous trucks to succeed.”
The shift to an industry overhaul to autonomous trucks won’t happen next year, but is a “5-, 10-, 20-year project,” according to Koopman. And to gain public acceptance, driverless trucks have to be perfect. “People are going to be naturally reluctant to operate their passenger vehicle next to a big, huge truck that has no driver in it. And the way you have to deal with that is you need to have the companies be very respectful of the other road users, not aggressive towards them. But they also have to have a perfectly spotless record, because every single crash will show up in the media.”
This is the second in a two-part series on trucking. Find part one here.
