Fully self-driving trucks may be several years away, but autonomous technologies are already being deployed that change the role of the driver.
Two players in the space, Pronto and Starsky Robotics, apply different approaches but share a vision of supporting America’s hard-working drivers, increasing safety for all road users.
Pronto is led by autonomous vehicle industry veterans and leverages more than a decade of experience in building autonomous driving companies to bring to market safety systems designed specifically for commercial trucking fleets. Pronto’s Copilot product provides the most advanced adaptive cruise control, electronic steering and collision mitigation technologies, all integrated as an added safety layer over today’s trucks. As an inexpensive retrofit, Copilot enables hard working truck drivers to benefit from safety and convenience features previously found only in luxury cars. Pronto’s technology is built on an industry-leading software foundation, which was validated in October 2018 through the first (and so far only) cross-country drive in an automated vehicle without any driver input into the controls.
Starsky Robotics, another startup based in San Francisco, successfully completed a 10-mile run in Florida without a person in the cab in June. The autonomous strategy currently being deployed by Starsky includes a human driver that handles the first and last mile from a remote location, while letting technology – like software and a combination of radar and camera sensors – handle the highway miles in between. The company currently has three autonomous capable trucks like the one used in the June pilot run, and it also hauls for-pay freight using three dozen normal, human-driven units.
Differing autonomous strategies will impact drivers in unique ways and this discussion will set context around the current state of the technologies and look ahead to what the future holds for the industry and the men and women responsible for moving it forward.