Autonomous trucking is moving quickly. But one of the industry’s next big challenges may have surprisingly little to do with the interstate.
It starts when the truck reaches the gate.
A recent Transport Topics story about Volvo Trucks Autonomous Solutions’ push toward end-to-end autonomous freight caught my attention because it highlights an important evolution taking place across transportation. For years, much of the autonomous trucking conversation has centered on hub-to-hub transportation: move a truck autonomously across a predictable highway corridor, then rely on people and conventional operations to handle the more complicated first and final portions of the journey.
That model is beginning to change.
Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Aurora are now extending autonomous freight directly to customer endpoints. Volvo describes this as eliminating intermediate terminal transfers and integrating autonomous transportation more directly into customers’ existing logistics operations. That sounds like a subtle distinction. It isn’t. Because once autonomous trucking begins moving from highway-to-highway toward true origin-to-destination transportation, the industry runs into a different mapping problem: The public road may be mapped. The private destination many times isn’t.
The Last Mile Doesn’t End at the Street Address
A truck arriving at a steel mill, manufacturing plant, distribution center, port, data center or sprawling industrial campus hasn’t necessarily “arrived” when GPS says it has. It may still need to:
- enter the correct commercial gate,
- complete check-in,
- follow truck-approved private roads,
- avoid restricted or unsafe areas,
- find staging,
- locate a particular dock, crane or loading area,
- respond to changing facility conditions,
- and eventually find the correct route back out.
Traditional consumer mapping was never designed to understand all of that.And autonomous freight doesn’t make the problem disappear. It makes solving it more important. Volvo’s own description of its Dallas-to-Oklahoma City autonomous operation illustrates this perfectly. Much of the interstate route had already been mapped. The remaining work focused primarily on the approaches from the highway to the customer endpoints. And today, movements inside those customer yards are still handled manually. Volvo itself describes extending autonomy into those yards as a next step. That’s a very important sentence for the future of freight.
Glympse Has Been Working on the Other Side of the Gate
We’ve spent years working on location, mapping, arrival and movement challenges. Today, we’re applying that experience to one of the least digitized pieces of the transportation journey: private industrial facilities.
Glympse can digitize private roads, gates, staging areas, loading locations, restricted zones and facility-specific routes that don’t exist (or don’t exist correctly) in conventional public mapping. Drivers can then receive precise, multilingual, voice-guided navigation through the facility without needing to download an app. Operations teams can simultaneously see who is approaching, who has arrived, where vehicles are on property, where they’re headed and how long they’ve been there. Geofences and operational triggers can help identify arrivals, departures, dwell, wrong-zone entry and route deviations. That capability is valuable for today’s human-driven truck. But think about what it potentially means for tomorrow’s transportation ecosystem.
Autonomous Trucks Still Need to Understand Private Places
Companies including Volvo Autonomous Solutions, Aurora, Waabi and others are solving extraordinarily difficult problems around autonomous vehicles, perception, decision-making, highway navigation and safety. That’s one layer of the problem. There is another layer waiting at the destination.
A vehicle can know exactly how to travel 500 miles across the interstate and still need reliable digital information explaining what happens during the final 500 yards. Which gate Which road can this truck use? Where does it stage? Which areas are restricted? Where exactly is Load Point 7? Has the facility changed the route because a crane, train, construction project or other operation is blocking the normal path? Who inside the facility knows the truck has arrived? Those questions exist whether the person, or system, operating the vehicle is human or autonomous.