U.S. Postal Service to Experiment with Autonomous Trucks

We’ve heard a lot about autonomous taxis, buses, drones, and planes, but commercial trucking hasn’t received nearly as much love – even with an estimated driver shortage of 175,000 by 2024. That could change with the USPS awarding a contract to TuSimple for self-driving trucks.

The United States Postal Service has enlisted TuSimple for a two-week trial spanning over a 1,000 miles between the Postal Service's Phoenix and Dallas distribution centers. According to PR Newswire, the autonomous semis will journey 22 hours each along the I-10, I-20 and I-30 corridors through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

And yes, a safety engineer and driver will be on each truck – a 40-ton behemoth careening down the highway with no human aboard is terrifying no matter how intelligent the truck is. That’ll change, of course, but we need volumes of field data to sate the public’s collective anxiety.

And there’s hardly a more fitting guinea pig than commercial trucking – about 71% of all freight tonnage moved in the U.S. goes on trucks, and TuSimple estimates that freight volumes will increase 35.6% by 2029. So commercial trucking isn’t going away anytime soon, human drivers or not.

TuSimple’s trucks will fulfill the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 4^th level of autonomous driving – meaning that they’re fully-autonomous and perform “all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip” but within a limited "operational design domain (ODD)".

According to the company, the trucks’ “Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors provide secondary perception and detection at medium- and short-range, while our RADAR sensors offer tertiary perception and detection at medium- and short-range,” and altogether, the trucks sport a 1000-meter vision range.

A positive trial could reverberate across the entire commercial trucking industry (and possibly change the public’s view of the Postal Service … but probably not). So there’s a lot riding on this.

For more on these trucks, go here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tusimple-self-driving-truck-united-100000780.html