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by maiybe 2058 days ago
Most of the responses to your comment are a bit off here.

The challenge of autonomous trucks isn't that they're "more dangerous," it's a matter of physics and current LIDAR technology. The weight of the truck means there is a minimal safe stopping distance at a given speed. Frankly, the quality and distance of current LIDAR tech falls short of the distance required for safe stopping at the average highway speed for a truck.

Put another way, the autonomous driving stack has difficulty seeing far enough ahead of a truck to successfully stop in time to not cause an accident in highway environments. You'll need better fusion of perception stack (LIDAR + imaging + neural nets) or better LIDAR ranges to be able to deploy autonomous trucking sooner.
4 comments
treis 2058 days ago
That doesn't sound plausible. Breaking distance goes up with the square of speed while it only increases linearly with weight. As an example, a truck going 55 can stop as fast as a car going 65. Ultimately it just means your self driving car has to drive a bit slower.
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choppaface 2058 days ago
Agree with the lidar range issue, but in a perfect storm... there was also major hype to drive money into robotaxis, e.g. Uber flashing an order for $10 billion of Mercedes S-Class ( https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-or... ).

This year we've seen Luminar start to go public via SPAC, and their high-range Lidar has been mounted on most (all?) non-Waymo self-driving truck prototypes. There's even a public dataset with Luminar data now: https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD

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nickik 2058 days ago
Radars already go 100m+.To avoid a front collision pretty much all these systems use radar, not lidar. Next generation radars are already doing 300m+.
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jeffreygoesto 2058 days ago
But angular resolution still is too low to disambiguate targets in the far field and neither frequencies nor maturity for imaging radar are here yet. Range alone does not solve the main radar problem.
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temp667 2058 days ago
Trucks already have slower speed limits. A truck going 50 can stop as fast as a car doing 75. Run them all night. No rest breaks.
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