POWER ELECTRONICS
The autonomous system presents its information clearly in a user-friendly fashion
One notable exception is Tesla, with its forever-vocal CEO claiming last year: “LIDAR is a fool’s errand, anyone relying on it is doomed.” Elon Musk views LIDAR as a crutch, and instead is a proponent of vision-based sensors combined with a neural network to decipher roads and objects. Tesla’s vehicles currently feature eight cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and a front-facing radar, though questions remain as to whether this will be enough to take its vehicles to level five autonomy on their own. Part of Musk’s justification for ignoring LIDAR is price, but as Sam Pfeifle asked on the Spar 3D website, at US$250 a unit for a US$37,000 car, is it that big a problem? To date, Tesla is sticking to its non-LIDAR approach, but it’s likely the firm will add LIDAR further down the line, if for no other reason than that it will add an additional layer of redundancy. Regardless of which combination
of sensors OEMs opt for, all are locked in a race to bring truly autonomous vehicles to the driving public first. It’s worth noting though, that while the buzz is frequently focused around self-driving cars, it could be another vehicle that beats the car to the fully autonomous punch.
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AUTONOMOUS FREIGHT The trucking industry is undergoing its own autonomous revolution, with start- ups and established OEMs investing no small sums in a bid to dominate the sector. Daimler announced back in January 2019 that it was investing a whopping US$570m into autonomous truck technology. September 2019 saw the fruits of its labour rollout, with testing starting in Virgina, USA of level four autonomous trucks. Amongst these heavy-hitters, smaller start-ups have emerged vying for supremacy in an increasingly crowded sector. TU Simple and Embark are examples of Silicon Valley-based start-ups that are combining the full suite of autonomous sensors to enable level four autonomy.
THE STAKES ARE HIGH Autonomy in the consumer car world serves to free up time for the passenger and ultimately improve safety. In the world of freight, time is money, and if mere mortals can be replaced, or at least augmented with autonomous systems, then the dollar value of each delivery can be driven down and the volume of deliveries pushed up. Embark’s CEO Alex Rodrigues predicts autonomous trucks will be able to travel 2.5 times
further in a single day than their non- autonomous counterparts as there will be no need to adhere to the 10-hour per day driving ceiling regulated for human drivers. Fuelling this push for autonomy is the ever-growing demand for more capacity as e-commerce providers such as Alibaba and Amazon continue to grow. The logistical model of businesses
such as Amazon sees goods moving between large distribution hubs connected via motorways, before smaller, light goods vans handle final delivery. These hubs tend to be connected via long motorways, the ideal environment for autonomous vehicles thanks to predictable traffic, steady cruising speeds and typically well-maintained roads. Beyond single autonomous vehicles, OEMs such as MAN are trialling multiple truck platooning systems. In these autonomous convoys, one or more trucks follow a lead vehicle maintaining a fixed speed and distance, with all the trucks in the convoy communicating with one another in real time. MAN predicts trucks moving in this fashion will benefit from slipstreaming, reducing C02
emissions and fuel consumption by up to 10% while shortening the
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