USPS starts driverless truck trial

Dive Brief:

The United States Postal Service (USPS) began employing self-driving trucks to transport mail between Phoenix and Dallas Tuesday in a two-week trial, according to a press release emailed to Supply Chain Dive.
USPS is seeking to determine how autonomous vehicles could impact delivery times and operational costs. This first trial is using TuSimple autonomous trucks, which are considered Level 4 autonomous, meaning they can operate without human oversight or intervention in certain conditions.
A human driver and a safety engineer will accompany every shipment. The trial will include five runs with each being roughly 2,000 miles round trip and all of the trips combining for a total of 45 hours on the road.

Dive Insight:

Though several autonomous truck efforts have sputtered to a stop, targeted pilots are still underway where regulators and conditions permit.

According to Reuter s, a driverless vehicle made by Einride is in daily commercial use by carrier DB Schenker on a public road in Sweden. Last week, Starsky Robotics conducted road tests on a 15-mile stretch of highway in the Tampa, Fla. area in partnership with the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority. And earlier this year, Amazon was spotted using Embark autonomous trucks on I-10 — a highway that runs from California to Florida. TuSimple vehicles will also traverse the I-10 in the USPS pilot, indicating that road conditions are suitable for Level 4 autonomy. 60% of U.S. economic activity touches I-10 at some point, according to the release.

According to TuSimple, long-haul routes under delivery time pressure are particularly good targets since autonomous trucks could replace a team of drivers who would need to share a small space while working overnight shifts.

Drivers remain in short supply and these types of trips are less and less attractive in a market where drivers can virtually choose their employer. TuSimple said in a statement its trucks are intended to free up drivers to handle the shorter routes that require more finesse.

"It is exciting to think that before many people will ride in a robo-taxi, their mail and packages may be carried in a self-driving truck," Xiaodi Hou, the founder, president and chief technology officer of TuSimple, said in a statement.