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Waymo officially expands self-driving effort into trucks
Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving company born out of Google X, is seen by many as the leader in the field of self-driving.
After focusing on autonomous passenger cars to soon launch a self-driving ride-hailing service, the company is now expanding the effort to trucks. The company has been known to have been working on a truck program since last summer, but they confirmed it today in a blog post.
[...] Now the program is expanding to Atlanta, Georgia, which they will make the home of Google's logistical operations. From there, Waymo will ship cargo to Google's data centers. They say that you will be able to see Waymo's blue trucks on the road as soon as next week as part of the pilot program
Also at TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and Reuters.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 11 2018, @06:51PM (2 children)
So when those forklifts inevitably tip over because their physics and control feedback engines were written by Indian coders, will they have a robotic voice that will squawk, "I've fallen...and I can't get up?!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @12:50AM
nah, the coding will be by Boston Robotics. When they start to trip and fall, they will just do a flip and land on their wheels again.
(Score: 3, Informative) by schad on Tuesday March 13 2018, @06:22PM
No. It turns out to be more cost-effective to leave them where they are and route the other automatic forklifts around them. Once all the loading docks are hopelessly blocked by broken auto-lifts, you simply bring in the robot bulldozers, level the entire facility, and rebuild it from premade modular components shipped with self-driving trucks.