Starsky Robotics reaches self-driving milestone

No human safety driver behind the wheel. No human backup waiting in the sleeper berth. No closed roads or constraints on regular traffic. This was the real deal.

On the morning of June 16, a self-driving truck operated by Starsky Robotics cruised along the Florida Turnpike at 55 mph without a human aboard, a milestone in efforts to usher in an autonomous era of transportation.

Starting at a rest stop along the turnpike in Okeechobee, Fla., the truck departed and drove for 9.4 miles under its own control, all while everyday motorists simultaneously used the same stretch of road unaware of the landmark development occurring in the adjacent lane.

Starsky had conducted prior unmanned truck tests but only on closed roads.

"It was easy for people not to notice," Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, CEO at Starsky, tells Automotive News. "It went so smoothly. At one point, we even got passed by another truck."

Amid all the hype in the autonomous industry, few companies have actually taken the step of removing safety drivers from their self-driving test vehicles. Within the trucking realm, it's believed the test is the first of its kind.

Even so, there were precautions. Lead and chase vehicles bracketed the truck as it trundled down the highway. A remote operator, known as a teleoperator, monitored the truck from afar and could have intervened should anything have gone awry.

For now, the unmanned test was a one-off event, not a permanent switch in Starsky's overall testing procedure. But Seltz-Axmacher says it represents the first step in a gradual process in which such unmanned tests will increase in frequency as the company eyes the start of unmanned commercial operations in the second half of 2020.

Starsky envisions self-driving trucks running along interstates and major highways between distribution hubs, while human drivers retain a role driving in more complicated off-highway environments. And that's how the Okechobee test concluded. A remote operator took control of the truck just before it exited the highway and piloted it through a toll plaza. The truck came to a stop on a maintenance road beyond the toll plaza, and a human test driver climbed aboard.

The test marked the culmination of roughly a year and a half's worth of concentrated effort for Starsky, a 4-year-old startup headquartered in San Francisco. In February 2018, the company conducted an unmanned drive at 25 mph on a closed portion of a county road. Days prior to the milestone test, the company conducted a 55-mph test on a closed portion of a highway in Tampa Bay.

Early efforts identified potential pitfalls — one test was notably interrupted when a link to the truck that enabled remote operations failed because power in a building housing a remote driver failed. As the company started planning for unmanned tests, it hired a director of safety policy from the aviation industry who has ensured that the engineering team developed redundant and robust safety systems — ones that not only work, but understand exactly how to handle an anomaly.

While some automated truck companies are building systems that augment human drivers, Starsky sees an existential delineation between those systems and developing technology that supports fully unmanned driving.

"We don't have a product if there's a person in the truck," Seltz-Axmacher said. "We only solve the problem with a fully driverless or fully unmanned truck. So we've built our safety architecture so that our system is really, really good at knowing when it's not working."

The company intends to increase its test fleet to 25 vehicles this year, and it expects an additional 100 by the time commercial operations begin. Currently, it tests in Florida and has a business operations office in Dallas.

Unmanned tests on active public roads have been rare. In December 2018, Waymo operated approximately a half-dozen of its Chrysler Pacifica minivans in the Phoenix area without safety drivers but soon reintroduced them. Nuro has tested its low-speed unmanned delivery vehicles on public roads, though they're not designed to ever carry human passengers. Last week, Yandex said it would remove human safety drivers from five vehicles later this summer.

The now-defunct self-driving truck startup Otto conducted a much-publicized 120-mile autonomous journey along Interstate 25 in Colorado in October 2016. In that instance, a safety driver watched the self-driving journey from the cab, and the vehicle traveled while kept apart from regular traffic.

As timelines for self-driving car deployments have broadly been tempered and pushed back over the past year, the expectations surrounding self-driving trucks have ramped up.

The potential of claiming a stake in what's an annual $700 billion industry in the U.S. alone, combined with a labor shortage of more than 50,000 human drivers, has made trucking a focus for self-driving developers.

In recent weeks, Waymo has renewed efforts to test self-driving trucks in Phoenix, Volvo Group teamed with Nvidia on joint development of self-driving systems for trucks and other commercial vehicles, and TuSimple conducted a pilot project with the U.S. Postal Service, hauling packages between distribution hubs in Dallas and Phoenix.

Earlier this year, Daimler announced it would invest half a billion euros in automated-truck research. Add to that ongoing work from other startups such as Ike Robotics, Embark, Einride, Kodiak Robotics and Pronto, and the collective efforts and competition in trucking have intensified.

Efforts such as Starsky's last week are a step along the route to making self-driving trucking a reality.

"A ten-mile test is clearly not a commercial run, but there are routes that are as short as 25 miles that are viable, and then when you get to 250 miles, you're in an interesting place," Seltz-Axmacher said. "So as far as testing, we'll go a couple of months before our next unmanned test, then a couple of weeks in between them, then days. Some of those will start to look like real freight-hauling operations, and this will start to look fairly real next year."