Transurban has released details on how its recent automated truck trial on CityLink went
Transurban has revealed how its recent automated truck trial on Melbourne’s CityLink road went, saying it was a smooth trip.
The leading toll-road operator says the truck drove uneventfully across more than 370km of automated travel.
Truck operations during the trial were supervised at all times by an on-board ‘safety driver’ and by personnel at Transurban’s 24-7 traffic control centre – but the level of intervention required was minimal throughout. The truck successfully stayed in its lane, changed lanes and adjusted speed as needed.
The trial was the first time a highly automated truck (a truck designed to drive without driver input) was tested in live-traffic conditions on public motorways in Australia. Transurban says automated trucks are emerging world-wide as a future freight transport solution, with on-road automated heavy-vehicle pilots underway in the US and Europe – and now in Australia.
As well as being the first time an automated truck operated itself on public roads, this trial was also the first time Transurban tested the benefits of sharing data from its roadside technology (such as road sensors and speed-limit signage) with a truck’s automated driving system (ADS), the technology that drives the truck.
Real-time data from Transurban systems was fed directly to the truck, and it measured how well this data helped the truck’s ADS understand road and traffic conditions beyond the reach of its own sensor data.
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“Our trial results suggest well-instrumented managed motorways with mid-to-high freight volumes will be ideal candidates for early automated truck deployments. These roadways have enough freight demand to attract automated truck operators and enough instrumentation to generate infrastructure data to support the automated trucks,” Transurban says.
“We found integrating our road-infrastructure data into the ADS enabled safer on-road deployment of the automated truck. For example, instead of training the ADS to read LED signs along the road, we provided a data feed that gave the ADS direct and reliable access to the information typically conveyed by signs along the motorway.
“We note that while the truck performed well under the conditions presented during the trial, real-life operations would involve many different driving scenarios and our trial did not include all of these. Therefore, our findings can’t be applied broadly, across all automated trucks and all public roads.”
The trial findings are helping Transurban – and its government and industry partners – better understand how roads and road technology can support the introduction of automated trucks.