When discussing the idea of autonomous trucks hauling freight around the country, it’s almost impossible for the mind not to wander to a futuristic landscape where all vehicles are self-driving.
It’s a futuristic era reminiscent of some of your favourite sci-fi films, where the truckie, the cabbie, the forkie, and all driving-adjacent jobs has come to an end. Drivers, simply, no longer exist.
That landscape will thankfully almost certainly be restricted to the silver screen. It’s undeniable that the automation of the road transport industry is not just coming though. It’s already here.
The key difference is that the automation of commercial transport will help improve the conditions of those working in the transport industry, rather than destroy it.
Applied EV is one of a host of companies not just embracing this approach to autonomous road transport. It’s accelerating it.
The Australian-based global operation was founded in 2015 and has been developing its two flagship products – the Blanc Robot and Digital Backbone – for a decade.
It has just signed a new partnership agreement with UK-based autonomous vehicle software provider Oxa and has an existing relationship with Japanese manufacturer Suzuki to continue progressing its product.
As co-founder and CEO of Applied EV, Julian Broadbent has played a key role in the company’s journey since the very beginning.
With 100 autonomous vehicles set to be rolled out for a new trial as part of the recently announced Oxa partnership, Broadbent tells ATN he sees the future of autonomous vehicles in Australia as a complementary piece to the existing transport industry, not a replacement for it.
“I think the world is influenced by what it sees and what it hears,” Broadbent says. “If you look at a first principles kind of approach, Australia is a leader in automation.
“But it’s not Robotaxi, which is what people see in the media and what stirs the soul. We can all see ourselves in a Robotaxi, but I don’t think we can imagine ourselves being involved in rock being loaded into the back of a truck at rural Australian mine sites.
“The Australian mining industry has been using automation at a commercial level since 2008, and most of the seaports in Australia are already fully automated.”
“Sure, it’s not Robotaxis driving down Main Street in the middle of a city, but we certainly see Australia as providing a number of verticals to complete roles on mining sites.
“There are thousands of jobs for these vehicles to do on a mining site that people don’t really want to do, and it’s a great use for automation.
“Workers in some of these really challenging environments having to stop what they’re doing to get in a truck that’s been sitting out in the open on a 45-degree day, then drive it for a couple of hours, get out, and do it again.
“Another application we’re talking about with Oxford is related to solar farms. These farms are 12-15 square kilometres of identical rows of solar panels.
“Operating the vehicles that travel around these solar farms is not a good job at all, I don’t think it would appeal to anyone.
“The world is built on innovation to make our lives easier; that’s how the world works. Autonomous vehicles can be in the category of helping make peoples’ lives better and easier without being the threat some people perceive them to be.”
Australia is home to some of the most incredible pieces of automated technology in the world, with the hot, difficult conditions of mine sites in Western Australia often used as the proving ground for any new or emerging application.
Rio Tinto became the first company in the world to use driverless trucks at its mine sites when it engaged autonomous vehicles to transport iron ore at its Yandicoogina and Nammildi sites back in 2016.
Now, that in-mine technology has progressed to the extent where Element 25’s Butcherbird Mine will be the site of the world’s first proper fleet of autonomous mining trucks.
11 autonomous rigid Scania G 60 8×4 tippers will be put to work at the site.
These types of vehicles and this type of technology is often met with equal parts fanfare, concern and disdain, despite the hours upon hours of trials, feedback and fixes actioned to make them a viable alternative.
Broadbent says the best opportunities to progress Applied EV’s technology is to go to those with a direct line to the issues that currently face the logistics industry. Those who work in it.
“We tend to find the best opportunities for automation when we’re not pushing a rope,” he continues.
“I think some people build a product and then try to sell it, but there are so many moving parts here that I don’t think that’s good for business.
“We need the customer to be engaged in the whole process, we need them to tell us about their challenges, offer a solution and then discuss whether our products solve the problem.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to work out how our vehicles can work side by side with traditional vehicles.
“Some of our customers have 100,000 vehicles in their fleet, and it’s just naïve to think you could replace that overnight with autonomous vehicles. It’s crazy.
“It’s important to work out where our vehicles sit in in the same ecosystem as traditional vehicles, to work with the same fleet management system, the same warehouse management system. How to augment our product into the value chain and have end customers achieve success across all their different verticals.
“The biggest risk logistics companies face is their margins are low and the cost of completing their service is going up.
“It may be utopian thinking, but I’d like to think autonomous vehicles can help people keep their jobs in logistics because we can help lower the cost of some of the most expensive parts of the value chain.”
Applied EV is by no means in this pursuit alone though. Those aforementioned partnerships with Oxa and Suzuki will be crucial in helping the business not only continue to progress its product in harsh, real-world conditions, but to then scale it for further, more wholesale use when the time is right.
Broadbent says progression of autonomous commercial transport will not just come from one business operating in one part of the transport supply chain. Instead, it will be a holistic collaboration between brands, businesses and the industry itself.
“If you break down all the steps in delivering autonomous vehicles into a use case with a logistics customer, there are so many moving parts,” he says.
“There are the suppliers of the vehicle, the technology that goes into the vehicle, the manufacturing of the vehicle, the customisation and adaption to make them fit for purpose – particularly in the logistics space – like adding garbage compaction or refrigeration.
“There are different driver choices, the need to integrate the vehicle into fleet and warehouse management systems.
“Then, finally, you get to the logistics guys that are running the outfit who need to provide the final service to the customer.
“When you break all that down, you have a lot of major industries in that value chain that are playing a role.
“No one can boil the ocean and do the whole lot. A few companies have tried, but it’s just immense.
“These relationships are absolutely necessary. Our relationship with Oxa started a while ago. One of our very first customers at Applied EV was the University of Sydney robotics lab, and one of the founders of Oxa did part of his tertiary education there.
“He repatriated to the UK but was looking for some support. In simple terms, Oxa is an autonomous driving software company, and we’re focused on the vehicle side.
“A lot of companies wanted to take on the whole lot in the early days, but now they’re realising people need to play their part.
“One pathway is the traditional Silicon Valley ‘we want to take on a huge problem, build a team and raise a lot of money to solve it’ pathway, which is the highest level of difficulty to achieve.
“It’s like a double black diamond difficulty goal to achieve.
“The promises that are being made about the services becoming available to communities and the world are extremely hard to forecast because that challenge is so high and there are so many moving parts.
“The other pathway is the one we’ve taken.
“There is almost no scale in Robotaxi today, even the trials that are going on is approximately 1000 vehicles maximum for each company, give or take. That’s tiny in the world of logistics and it’s tiny in the world of automotive.
“Applied EV has said if we’re on the automotive technology side, we get the scale. Our mission has been to address the technology gap with our ECUs that are safety rated, integrate them into a platform and start using that platform for some lower-level jobs that can build the scale of the platform.
“Then, when we look to get into some more difficult markets, we already have scale.
“Our goal will be a 10x on Google or Waymo’s current scale today, and we’re going to do it by having the same platform in several different markets, which is what we’ve done with Suzuki.
“Because we don’t do autonomous driving software, we can make that platform available for other companies currently doing Robotaxi so they can use it for other jobs like logistics as well.”
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