Driver shortage (more than 230 thousand drivers are missing in Europe), increase of road freight transport by 35% at least by 2050 worldwide, and willingness to make drivers’ working conditions safer are just some of the reasons to accelerate the introduction of highly automated solutions to improve the European logistics chain.
To bring the vision of self-driving trucks closer to reality, a pool of international companies has just accomplished reference tests on the route from Rotterdam to Oslo as part of the European MODI initiative.
Self-driving trucks are not yet part of our everyday lives, but work is being done on them daily to prepare the network and pave the way for automated driving. Together with the truck manufacturer DAF and the research organizations in the information and technology field Q-Free and SINTEF, Gruber Logistics executed a test from Rotterdam to Oslo along the North Sea-Baltic and the Scandinavian-Mediterranean TEN-T Corridor. The Gruber Logistics driver took four days to pass through infrastructures belonging to the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, a non-EU country.
Crossing different countries entails engaging with infrastructures that are similar in form but markedly different in substance. Road signs, languages, toll systems, speed limits, and road legislation are merely a few of the variances encountered when travelling abroad, necessitating behavioural adaptation. With the advent of automated driving, such adjustments will need to occur without human intervention. Mapping the external environment and digitally encoding every signal and regulation constitute the initial steps toward a system capable of communicating with the automated vehicle in a unified language.
The new DAF truck was equipped with the latest ADAS system and sensors, including cameras provided by Q-Free, to record relevant data during transportation, including the quality of road markings, signage recognition, and connection quality. SINTEF is now assessing whether the data quality on the defined route is high enough for future-level L4 automated driving.
This is the MODI initiative: The European MODI initiative brings together 34 private and public organizations from business and research that have set themselves the task of accelerating the introduction of “Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility” (CCAM) for logistics through demonstrations and overcoming barriers to the roll-out of automated transport systems and solutions.