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by nine_k 1412 days ago
I can imagine several autonomous trucks sharing large segments of roads, and splitting into a number of locations at the ends. Such vehicles could benefit from coordination on the shared segmets.

I suppose that trucks serving most open mines work that way: they have to share the common spiral part.

1 comments

Ish. To _probably_ annoy you and everyone on this thread, I'll tell you how this works for a "large publicly traded company that has autonomous vehicles in mines."

Essentially they have a portion of the mine site designated as the "autonomous pit," which is the only place where autonomous vehicles can operate. Not all vehicles in the autonomous pit are autonomous (basically no one can automate the vast majority of industrial vehicles, which is part of what we want to solve). In order to be able to see these non-autonomous vehicles, this PubCo makes the mine buy a $20-50k transceiver to put on every non-autonomous vehicles (in addition to the $1m auton hw upgrade and $250k/yr in autonomy SaaS).

These autonomous vehicles do have sensing, but they more rely on those transceivers to tell where vehicles they shouldn't hit are.

So ya, sure, it kindof works like how you think it should. But in a worse way.