Amazon’s Werner Vogels, chief technology officer and vice president, traveled to TuSimple’s facility in Arizona to learn more about the challenges with supply chain issues, how autonomous trucking works, and whether it can help with these ongoing concerns. “Now Go Build” is a video series hosted by Vogels to highlight the startups and the technology “solving our planet’s most urgent problems.”
Amazon Web Services’ latest episode of ‘“Now Go Build” provided a deep dive into autonomous trucking technology.
In this episode, Vogels talked with TuSimple’s Ersin Yumer, engineering and operations executive; Graham Taylor, senior director of hardware; and Robert Rossi, VP autonomous operations group and maps, to better understand autonomous trucking and how it will change the industry. (And, of course, the role of Amazon’s cloud services.)
A Look at Autonomous Trucking Tech
Yumer and Taylor explained how TuSimple’s autonomous truck technology works, starting with how the base trucks are outfitted with the company’s technology and sensors.
TuSimple removes the vehicle’s sleeper, bed, fridges, and more to install its equipment. Approximately 2,000 feet of cabling goes into the truck when accounting for the power, cameras, and sensors.
The video explores the placement of those cameras and sensors, including short-range lidar sensors on each side of the truck. Where hood mirrors would be, TuSimple added short-range lidar. Cameras and long-range lidar are placed on a rack on the top of the cab. This creates better visibility in front of the truck and helps detect pedestrians and other vehicles.
The video explained TuConnect and other technology and the role of Amazon’s S3 cloud storage in TuSimple’s technology.
Rossi explained how the hardware moves sensor data to the software in the truck. The sensor data then goes into the autonomy software, where the raw sensor data is turned into metadata about what is around the vehicle, which then goes into the prediction engine. Based on the predictions, TuSimple’s system is able to plan a trajectory around the obstacles. Taking the trajectory and profile information, the system creates actuator information and sends it back to the truck so the vehicle can steer and accelerate.
For the complete article on how autonomous trucking works CLICK HERE.
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