Are American Roads Ready for Level 4 Autonomous Commercial Trucks?

• Autonomous truck developer Aurora Innovation is preparing a driverless truck route between Houston and Dallas, slated to open in 2024, and has opened a special lane that will be used by the trucks.

• The SAE Level 4 semitrucks are designed to operate between warehouses in the two cities, with Aurora having already launched pilot operations with a number of commercial partners.

• The company has designed special cargo terminals to work with autonomous trucks, maximizing their time on the road, including on-site weight stations allowing trucks to skip inspection sites along highways.

Until a few years ago, driverless trucks seemed like something out of sci fi film set in the year 2050.

Even when robotaxis began crowding San Francisco, the concept of self-driving trucks still seemed fairly distant, if only because the bureaucratic hurdles necessary to make something like that happen seemed more insurmountable than setting robotaxis loose in the confines of the Bay Area, even as Gatik's "middle mile" trucks performed real cargo runs in Kansas.

But it appears we are now just months away from self-driving semitrucks hitting the road. And they will even have their own special lanes.

Aurora Innovation says it has opened the first driverless truck lane between Dallas and Houston, in one of the busiest commercial routes in the southwest. The company has also prepared one other crucial piece of infrastructure required to make this work at scale: Commercially ready terminals for autonomous trucks.

"Opening a driverless trucking lane flanked by commercially ready terminals is an industry-first that unlocks our ability to launch our driverless trucking product," said Sterling Anderson, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Aurora.

The trucks themselves will be SAE Level 4 vehicles, able to operate in a geofenced area and travel along a thoroughly mapped and predictable route. This makes them similar in many respects to robotaxis, which are also SAE Level 4 vehicles, but operate along far more fluid routes while still being confined to a given number of neighborhoods. The trucks themselves will be confined to using designated lanes.

More than simply outfitting semitrucks with sensors, Aurora has designed a terminal blueprint intended to maximize the amount of time the trucks spend on the road, with on-site weight stations allowing trucks to skip inspection points on the road.

"The ability to service and support driverless trucks 24/7/365 is critical to launching a valuable product that can handle dynamic demand," the company notes.

Without the special infrastructure, the concept would not be ready for a commercial rollout.

A major part of the commercially ready terminals are Aurora's command centers, staffed with remote specialists who will oversee around-the-clock operations. The command centers will also house dispatchers who will allocate and schedule the trucks and trailers.