Daimler plans self-driving trucks at airports

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The Financial Times  /  October 9, 2017

Daimler Trucks is aiming to get ahead of rivals in the shift to mobility services with a simplified, self-driving fleet of lorries that can remove snow at airports and make it safe for aircraft to land.

The 25-tonne, bright orange lorries are unique in the world of self-driving vehicles because they are automated rather than autonomous. This means they take a predefined route rather than making split-second decisions on direction through the use of sensors.

“We don’t need artificial intelligence, we don’t need the latest technology,” said Philipp Dreyer, who heads the project. “It’s not so much autonomous in the sense of watching the surroundings and making decisions, it’s more a predefined lane that is basically stored, digitally, in the vehicle.”

The technology is deliberately simpler than more sophisticated vehicles, such as the Google Waymo car with its built-in cameras, to keep costs low and make the project viable before others in 2019.

The project underscores that big developments in driverless vehicles are likely to come from the transportation sector itself, rather than consumers who want the convenience of a car that navigates a city on its own.

“The first movers won’t be the consumer,” said David Park, vice-president of marketing at Optimal Plus, a big data analytics company. “It’s the trucking industry, the taxi industry. They want the efficiencies and scale of continuous driving. These are industries where time, literally, is money.”

In a demonstration of the technology at a private airport 90 minutes outside of Frankfurt, an operator sitting in the driver’s seat of the four-lorry convoy’s lead vehicle typed in a few commands. The lorry accelerated, turned on to the runway and began to travel at 30km an hour. Three identical, unoccupied lorries made the same moves at a safe distance behind the lead vehicle, then shifted into a staggered formation and dropped high-speed snow-clearing brushes on to the pavement in a simulation of clearing the snow away.

Daimler can set the parameters within an inch of where the vehicles should drive. The project was commissioned by Frankfurt Airport, whose “winter services” of de-icing aircraft and clearing runways will cost €23m this year. The trouble is, the airport must have specialist drivers at the ready even when it does not snow. So it tasked Daimler with creating a driverless platoon that could carry out the mission, 24 hours a day.

For Daimler, the challenge was an opportunity to move from selling a product to creating a solution tailor-made for a customer. The company said 40 airports of similar size around the world would be potential customers.

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