Early that morning – for 9.4 miles – Starsky Robotics became the first company to test a completely unmanned vehicle at highway speeds on a public road alongside traffic when a remote driver sitting behind a bank of screens 200 miles away navigated a Volvo VNL, towing an unloaded trailer, onto the highway from a rest stop before ceding control of the rig to an onboard suite of sensors and software.
“We beat Waymo. We beat all the big OEMs. We’ve beat just about the whole industry,” says Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, founder and CEO of the San Francisco based start-up.
Starsky’s strategy for autonomous trucking 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.
“We’ve been wholly focused on getting the safety driver out of the truck,” Seltz-Axmacher says, noting all prior autonomous truck testing had included a driver onboard to monitor the truck and its systems, ready to assume control at any given moment.
In the case of the June test run, the remote driver started the truck from a stopped position at a rest area and navigated on to the feeder road toward the highway. Once the truck reached 30 mph – and flanked by lead and follow spotter vehicles – the rig piloted itself, relying on a lane keep assist platform and adaptive cruise control.
