Lawrenceville-based Locomation Inc. has begun offering stakeholders and members of the media the opportunity to ride inside the cabin of its autonomously driven trucks.
It's the first time the company has made such an opportunity available to those outside of its workforce, and it comes as it prepares to launch a pilot program with one of its partners, which could occur as soon as this summer.
But it's also an effort that highlights how Locomation's technological achievements aren't just hype or vaporware and that it has enough confidence in the technology to not only test it on public roads, but also to let outsiders serve as validators of its claims as well.
The most recent of these invite-only demos, of which the company said about a dozen or so have taken place over the past few weeks, occurred on Feb. 8. Locomation asked Pittsburgh Inno and an official with the Federal Highway Administration to ride along inside one of its autonomously driven trucks on a 20-mile stretch up and down Pennsylvania Route 576, which started near Pittsburgh International Airport and headed south toward McDonald before turning around to return back to the starting point.
"Ready for autonomy. Ready for autonomy," a feminine-sounding voice announced as a series of chimes went off inside the cabin at the onset of the trip. "Autonomy engaged."
Locomation is looking to offer trucking companies solutions to various industry challenges via its Autonomous Relay Convoy (ARC) system. With ARC, a human-driven truck leads a second truck that drives itself by mirroring the actions made by the human driver ahead of it all while a secondary driver sleeps or remains off duty inside the following truck. The two drivers then swap roles when the first driver reaches their hourly limit for a given day, which effectively allows trucks equipped with Locomation's tech to go twice the distance compared to if these two trucks were limited by the hourly limits of their individual drivers.
And to its credit, Locomation's tech worked during this live demonstration on public roadways.
After deploying the autonomy sequence, the driver of the follower truck put their hands just below the steering wheel, palms up, to show that they weren't influencing the vehicle as it embarked on a wide turn to enter the highway. The following truck then kept a 1.25-second distance — about 100 feet at highway speeds — between it and the truck in front of it. Meanwhile, a testing operator in the passenger seat observed and noted various metrics that the truck recorded such as speed, gap distance, nearby vehicles on the road, live camera feeds, driver hours logged and other data points.
The following truck successfully signaled and changed lanes multiple times and even navigated around a slow-moving vehicle in the right lane during what was otherwise a relatively uneventful trip, all actions it took after copying those made by the truck in front of it.
In addition to testing on public roads, Locomation also puts its trucks on an enclosed track at the Transportation Research Center near Columbus, Ohio. But testing on public roads with all the uncertainties that come with it serves as a much better validator of its capabilities.
"In essence, we're able to show that on-road demonstrations are a lot more interesting to people than track demonstrations because you don't have that control over everything like you can with a track, and nothing validates the technology like on-road, actual demonstrations," Finch Fulton, vice president and strategy at Locomation, said. "It's just about being able to show these more complex on-road demonstrations, and frankly, you don't really see that in many places outside of like Texas or on I-10 through Arizona and places like that. So the ability to show [this, and] not just in one place in the country that always has good weather, has a lot of commercial feasibility."
Locomation asked that no photos or videos be taken inside of the cabin due to its confidentiality policies. But aside from a cabinet housing various computer components near the back of the cabin, some monitors and a few other minor alterations, the interior wasn't all that different from that of a regular truck. On the outside, however, cameras and sensors can be seen all around the vehicle, which is needed for its autonomous capabilities.
"We have come a long way; I mean, is it perfect yet? No, I don't think anybody here will tell you it's perfect yet, but coming from even just the willingness to put somebody in the back, yeah, we're comfortable doing that," Lucas Renner, senior manager of operations and compliance at Locomation and the company's first employed driver, said. "So now even just being able to comfortably go in autonomy and have trust in the system; when I first started here four years ago, I don't know if I would've told you I'd be that comfortable in four years, but I'm that comfortable [now]. It's pretty wild."
Locomation employs about 80 workers, almost all of whom work out of its Pittsburgh headquarters. The company is tentatively expecting to start gradually rolling out its ARC system with its initial trucking partners by the end of the year following a pilot program with one of such unnamed partners, which is set to start in the coming months.
