Daimler Unveils Automated Mercedes Benz Arocs Trucks

Daimler has revealed it’s latest automated and driver-less truck, the Mercedes-Benz Arocs.

Unlike some of the initial attempts at truck automation, the Arocs works without needing expensive sensors installed on the trucks themselves. Instead the trucks work with GPS mapped routes enabling accuracy from a lead vehicle that coordinates the direction of following trucks.

The vehicles are designed for circumscribed areas, too, which make them more practical for use in the near-term vs. ambitious self-driving projects like free driving on real-world roads.

There are many truck-based operations that require vehicles covering a pre-defined route repeatedly in the same fashion. For example, luggage carts, waste disposal, on-campus mail delivery as well as industrial scale grass cutters and other landscaping vehicles.

This may be the first realistic and practical step towards automation of trucks. However, experts in the field seem to agree that Driver-less trucks on open roads are still a fairly distant prospect.

[Source: Techcrunch]