Plus.ai autonomous semi truck at Monument Rocks in Kansas.
Plus.ai’s self-driving truck technology has come a long way. Like across the country long.
The California-based company’s Level 4 autonomous semi-tractor-trailer recently drove 2,800 miles from a shipping hub in Tulare, California to another in Quakertown, Pennsylvania on I-15 and I-75. The three-day trip was done “primarily” in autonomous mode with a safety driver in the vehicle to take over when needed. Plus.ai says this trip represents the “first L4 U.S. cross-country commercial pilot hauling a fully-loaded refrigerated trailer of perishable cargo.” That perishable cargo? Land O Lakes butter.
Plus.ai says that the autonomous truck drove during the day and at night, and safely navigated road construction situations, mountains, tunnels and the rain and snow you would expect on a cross-country trip in December. To do this, the truck uses Plus.ai’s “advanced autonomous driving system” which is made up of multimodal sensors, deep learning visual algorithms and simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) technologies. Aside from the safety driver, a safety engineer was also on board to monitor the various autonomous driving systems.
“Continued advances in our autonomous trucks will make it possible for these quick cross-country runs to be the norm in the future,” said Plus.ai’s COO and co-founder, Shawn Kerrigan, in a statement. “We are excited to demonstrate what our technology can already achieve today.”
Plus.ai was started in 2016 and focuses on bringing autonomous Class 8 trucks to the commercial transport segment. It is working with truck manufacturers, shipping companies and fleet operators in the U.S. and China and sees a trillion-dollar opportunity in turning the largest vehicles on our roads into self-driving robots for hub-to-hub trucking. About half of that market is in the U.S and the other half is in China, which is why Plus.ai has offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing and near Shanghai.
Plus.ai plans to have its first commercial product available for sale in 2023. Before then, expect to hear more about cross-country self-driving delivery trips like the just-completed butter run. At CES in January, for example, Plus.ai held an in-town demonstration on the streets of Las Vegas using an International LT Series tractor. In October, the company announced a partnership with the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), that government agency’s first partnership with an autonomous trucking company. The plan is to test self-driving trucks on MnDOT’s MnROAD cold-weather pavement testing facility. Kerrigan told me earlier this year that aside from all of these tests to get the technology right, bringing autonomous trucks to market also requires getting the supplier chain ready and making sure laws are updated to take self-driving vehicles into account.
