Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - April 2023 - 4

EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Bill Visnic
Editorial Director
Bill.Visnic@sae.org
Autonomous trucking hits rocky road
Within a four-week stretch - from
roughly mid-February to mid-March -
a steady stream of autonomous-trucking
news hit. A quick summary: As several
startups in the autonomous-truck
development space struggle financially,
established OEMs keep trucking with
acquisitions and partnerships to bolster
their automated-driving capabilities.
On March 3, the cofounder and CEO
of Embark Trucks, which was founded
in 2016, sent an email to all its employees
announcing the company's likely
imminent closure. " The last nine months
have been tough for the autonomous
trucking industry, and for Embark - the
capital markets have turned their backs
on pre-revenue companies, just as slipping
manufacturer timelines have delayed
the prospect of scaled commercial
deployment, " Alex Rodrigues wrote.
The company laid off about 70% of
its employees and shut down its offices
in Southern California and Houston.
Embark's remaining personnel are
winding down its day-to-day operations
and evaluating options to sell assets,
restructure or shut down completely.
Embark's announcement was preceded
by a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story reporting
that autonomous platooning developer
Locomation was closing its doors. The
unsurprising culprit: an inability to raise
additional investment capital. However,
CEO and cofounder Çetin Meriçli denies
that the company is shuttering, according
to a Heavy Duty Trucking report. He told
the publication that Locomation reduced
most of its " non-engineering headcount
in the face of economic headwinds, " but
that 200-mile (320-km) platooning runs
employing its human-guided autonomy
were still ongoing.
More disruption on the autonomousdevelopment
front came this past
December, when TuSimple and Navistar
made a brief joint statement ending their
co-development agreement signed in
2020. " I decided to return as TuSimple's
CEO to address the challenges ahead
and to set us on a path to long-term stability, "
Cheng Lu said in the statement.
4 April 2023
Ryan Gehm
Editor-in-Chief
Ryan.Gehm@sae.org
Navistar considers autonomous driving
technologies to be " a key component
of a future transportation and logistics
system, " according to VP Srinivas
Gowda. The truck maker indicated to
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering that it
has something in the works: " We will
have more to share on our autonomous
strategy and technology development
in the coming weeks, " a spokesperson
asserted in December.
Meanwhile, Daimler Truck and its subsidiary
Torc Robotics forge ahead, agreeing
to acquire Algolux Inc. for its IP and
expertise in the areas of computer vision
and machine learning. Torc has been
working with the Montreal-based startup
for a year-plus on multiple perception
concepts and methods for improving
object detection and distance estimation.
Algolux software, which currently is operating
on initial Freightliner Cascadia
test vehicles in the U.S., is expected to
play a role in Daimler's goal to bring SAE
Level 4 autonomous trucks into series
production within this decade.
Likewise, Volvo Autonomous
Solutions (VAS) is advancing its expertise
by partnering with Ascend LLC, the
first asset-based carrier to reserve capacity
for VAS's hub-to-hub autonomous
offering based on Volvo's VNL long-haul
truck utilizing the Aurora Driver automated-driving
system. VAS hubs in
Dallas and Houston, Texas, will complete
the linehaul movement to destination
hubs from which Ascend drivers will take
loads to their final destinations.
On a cautiously positive note for automated-trucking
startups, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania-based Aurora Innovation
appears on track to scale operations in
preparation for commercial launch in
2024. Amazon and Toyota remain shareholders
in the company. " This will be a
historic year for Aurora as we prepare our
autonomous trucking fleet for commercial
launch, " cofounder and CEO Chris
Urmson said in a January statement.
Buckle up: 2023 promises more bumps
in the road to autonomy.
Ryan Gehm, Editor-in-Chief
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Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - April 2023

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