Self-driving tech companies have collectively logged millions of miles in either controlled or real-world testing, but just about every one of those miles had an actual person involved.
Ruben Cardenas, safety driver for autonomous truck startup Plus, reports to a location where the truck is staged to discuss with engineering and dispatch any testing that needs to be performed. "We're talking about performance testings, branch testing different parts of our system specifically – like merges or slowing and stopping," he said.
Once assigned to a truck, he strikes out for the highway (or closed course depending on the needs of the day) to "capture the data," he said. "That data will then be given to engineers, and they will work on it offline and make improvements, tune it, those types of things."
Cardenas wears many hats inside the truck. As vehicle operations specialist, he's both active driver and emergency fail-safe for the system when the truck is operating in autonomous mode. Generally, he will drive the truck manually to the location where the testing is to take place before turning driving duties over to the system. "I will weave in and out of manual driving and semi-autonomous driving," he said, adding that he’s probably driving manually less than 10% of the time.
