Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - December 2021 - 17

AUTONOMOUS FEATURE
CV autonomy: PICKING THE
'LOW-HANGING
FRUIT'
John Deere recently acquired
Silicon Valley-based startup
Bear Flag Robotics to accelerate
automation on farms.
Increasingly automated commercial vehicles offer challenges and opportunities
in simulation, data management and standardization.
by Ryan Gehm
F
unctional safety is a major reason why autonomous-vehicle
(AV) development timelines have
been pushed back, and why SAE " Level 2-plus "
driving automation has become more of a focus
for many companies in the near term. " There still is
some focus on Level 4 for the future, but it's basically
on the backburner, " said Suga Ragunathan, director at
KPIT, a software development and integration company
that assists OEMs and suppliers with advanced driverassistance
system (ADAS) and AV validation.
Do industry experts realistically envision the deployment
of fully-automated Class 8 trucks? The question was
posed at the SAE COMVEC 2021 conference. The consensus:
" Yes, but... " Anupam Gangopadhyay, engineering
director for controls and software at Navistar, summed it
up: " It's all in the ODD [operational design domain]. "
Navistar does not yet offer full SAE L2 capability,
Gangopadhyay said. Lane-centering, which proactively
keeps the vehicle centered within its lane, is not yet available
on its trucks but " that's obviously coming. It's in the
works, " he said. " As we go to L4, for us it's going to be a
truck driving on a freeway that is manageable without
touching areas where our ODD cannot support it. "
Stephan Olsen, general manager at PACCAR
Innovation Center, agreed. " It's not going to be a
light-switch event, " he said. " It's going to start in the
well-understood ODD [scenarios] - I-10 [which runs
from Santa Monica, Calif. to Jacksonville, Florida],
Texas, New Mexico and Arizona where there's good
weather, defined A-to-B points. As the technology
matures, it'll grow from there. "
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
The " middle-mile " ODD is not necessarily " low-hanging fruit, " but it is
" the next fruit to be picked " in L4 on-highway autonomy, according to
Olsen. " Today, there's a driver shortage - that's one of the top three
issues that any fleet operator will tell you is a challenge, " he said. " If autonomy
can solve that middle mile, that leaves the local routes for the
human drivers where they can get home at night and see their families. "
Automation in off-highway applications, particularly in the military,
can pose some unique challenges not encountered on roadways.
" When you're in an off-highway environment, you may not know
what your boundary conditions are, you may not know what obstacle
detection you're looking at, depending upon the decisions that have
to be made, " said Michael Puroll, chief engineer - system architect at
AM General. " With military, it gets even more difficult. Sometimes
decisions have to be made about, do you go through an obstacle? Is
it a friend-or-foe situation? You don't necessarily want to stop an automated
vehicle in all conditions. So, the what-if scenarios become
much greater in off-road situations. "
Parsing terabytes of data
Commercial trucks can collect more than 10 TB of data per day, some
experts claim. " That's a lot of data to store, " KPIT's Ragunathan said. " We
cannot use all of the data, so it is really important to understand what we
want to collect, what conditions that we want to focus on. "
Bear Flag Robotics, an agriculture technology startup based in
Silicon Valley, stores data on-board and pulls hard drives every week.
" By acre, 2 terabytes in a week are a lot of data and we cover a lot of
ground, " said Daniel Carmichael, farming operations manager for the
company, which was recently acquired by John Deere to accelerate
automation on farms. The companies have outfitted a Deere 8RT
tractor with Bear Flag's perception kit, which includes an inertial
December 2021 17
BEAR FLAG ROBOTICS
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - December 2021

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