You know how, when geese are flying in a group, they form a V-shape? This is because of the slipstream in the air. Geese take turns being in the leadership position, and the other geese benefit from the reduced energy output required to make their migration. The same concept applies to bike racing; when you aren’t the leader and get caught in the slipstream of the leader, you are “drafting”. Cyclists who are part of the group can save up to 40 percent in energy expenditures over a cyclist who is not drafting with the group. — The Science of Cycling (My colleague, Patrick, who is a bicyclist, says that drafting is a great feeling!) International Road Cycling Competition Grand Prix Minsk-2017 on July 8, 2017 in Minsk Republic of Belarus; Photo: Bigstock How can we apply that principle to cars and trucks on the road? Well, I’ll tell you. I had an interesting conversation with another colleague about autonomous driving, one of my favorite topics. I asked him how long he thinks it will be before we have an entire city using only autonomous vehicles within its city limits. He paused, and said that while he thinks that will eventually happen, it will be a long, long time before we see it. What’s more likely, he said, was that the trucking industry will be entirely transformed using technology that we already have. City driving is difficult, with narrow streets, lots of intersections with complicated signals and signs, convoluted maps (I’m looking at you , Boston), pedestrians, and more anomalies per square mile than you can shake a gearshift at. Highways are generally relatively straight, with fewer complications and fewer drivers. What’s more likely than a city going fully autonomous is that there will be vast portions of the interstate highway system that will have lanes specifically for truck caravans or trucking platoons. This concept has already been tested and proven. Companies and organizations such as Volvo Trucks, Daimler Trucks, the U.S. Army, Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology at U.C. Berkeley and Peloton Technology (check out the short video on their home page, very cool!) are developing platooning systems. The technology combines adaptive cruise control and forward collision warning with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. So how does it work? Pretty simple, actually. The lead manually-driven truck picks up the following trucks to form a convoy, or platoon, in which they are all connected to each other using V2V communication. When the lead truck brakes or turns, the subsequent trucks also brake or turn, so each truck can follow along closely behind, taking advantage of the slipstream created by the lead truck. The trucks stay about 40 feet apart compared with a recommended 324 feet between non-platooning trucks. Peloton claims fuel savings of about 10 percent. Now imagine if they were electric trucks using renewable energy! Eventually, the drivers in the following trucks could disappear. In fact, Volvo and FedEx have been conducting tests on a section of North Carolina Highway 540, the Triangle Expressway, since April, running three trucks towing two trailers each. The tests involve one driver, not three. The U.S. Army is deploying autonomous trucks faster than the industry expected, too, reported Alan Alder of Trucks.com. They are set to deploy dozens of autonomous trucks next year, as opposed to the original plan to put 300 autonomous trucks into service by 2025. The question is whether the trucking workforce can be convinced that platooning is a good thing. Shad Laws, vice president of product planning at Peloton Technology, says, “One of the keys to our system is truly a driver-centric design. Convincing a fleet owner is easy. Convincing drivers that this is something good and that they want to use is hard.” Here’s the thing, though—the reality is that there is currently a shortage of long-distance truckers. A major problem for the long-haul trucking industry is that a large percentage of these drivers are aging and are expected to retire. An October 2017, an American Trucking Association (ATA) analysis said truckers average 49 years old compared with 42 for other workers. With a projected shortage of 63,000 drivers this year and 174,000 projected in 2026, the industry needs solutions. Truck platooning may be just the thing to help save this industry, not destroy it. Michael Roeth, executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE), talked recently at a panel discussion about how platooning is a natural step in truck automation since it builds on the technology that is already being purchased on trucks. “A lot of the technology that is required to platoon two trucks is already on the truck,” he said. “Now we just have to figure out how to handle the vehicle-to-vehicle communication.” Indeed. Just as with all electronics, the technology has to be developed for these ideas to become our reality. Since all of the decision-making within an autonomous vehicle cannot be offloaded reliably to the cloud, a lot of the processing will have to be done on the edge—that is, within the processors on the vehicle itself. This is where the work with Cadence begins. —Meera What I read for this post: Autonomous Guided Platooning of Big Rigs Could Arrive Before Robo-Taxis Drivers Shortage, ELD Rule Top Trucking Industry Concerns For truck platooning to work, here’s what has to happen Peloton is Blazing a Trail for Trucking Startups Trucking and Logistics Will Lead the Autonomous Vehicle Revolution S. Army Deploying Autonomous Trucks Faster Than Expected Volvo, FedEx test autonomous truck ‘platooning’ on public U.S. road https://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/aerodynamics2.html https://peloton-tech.com/ https://www.scania.com![]()
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