Over six hundred experts in the driverless mobility space converged on San Diego to share progress and debate what the future should look like on our roads. The Automated Road Transportation Symposium leading companies deploying driverless vehicles laid out their latest progress and plans for expansion. Participants from overseas provided their unique viewpoints and rolled out their plans for the age of autonomy, says Forbes’ Richard Bishop.
In an interview at ARTS, May Mobility’s Director of Product, Kurtis Hodge, provided an update on their automated shared-ride deployments so far. Their first driverless operations were launched in Sun City, Arizona, last December. Using safety drivers, they are active in several other cities, including Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids in Michigan. He noted the variety their vehicles face, from urban operations in Ann Arbor to more of a small-town vibe in Grand Rapids.
Bishop himself provided an automated trucking plenary presentation at ARTS which provided a broad overview of the breadth and depth of this very active space. In both long haul and short haul, scalable fully driverless operations are expected by year’s end from Aurora, Gatik, and Kodiak. ISEE and Outrider are already running driverless in logistics yards, with Forterra operations starting next year. Across a wide range of industrial operations, where driver shortages are endemic, truck platooning systems from Forterra, Hexagon, and Kratos are enabling a single driver to haul multiple loads.
Truck automation has been on the agenda since the start of the ARTS event twelve years ago. In the early years, ARTS was a great place for nervous state and federal officials to rub shoulders with the system developers, while also hearing from sometimes skeptical researchers. Over the years, despite some bumps in the road stemming from companies like Starsky Robotics and TuSimple, a significant level of trust now exists among the key stakeholders. Not that they agree, necessarily, but that each sees the others as straight shooters.
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