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| For 21 hours a day, the N3 carries more trucks than cars, as this queue at Merrivale on Town Hill shows. Following successful experiments, Volvo and Scania are now ready to roll out robotically-steered trucks by 2018. Photo: Jonathan Burton |
SA’S busiest highway, the N3, will in the next 20 years see the
number of container trucks rising from about 4 650 today to about 27 400 a day,
according to forecasts in Gauteng’s 25-year transport plan.
As things stand, trucks outnumber cars on the N3 for 21 out of 24
hours, according to Professor Jacobus Walter, head of the transport and supply
chain management at the University of Johannesburg.
Which is why a railway line between Durban and Gauteng is
essential, according to Jack van der Merwe, head of government’s steering
committee and Gauteng’s 25-year integrated transport master plan (ITMP25).
Both men are regular speakers at the monthly Transport Forum. They
are well aware of Transnet’s long-awaited plans to spend billions on a
high-speed railway between Johannesburg and Durban, as well as to develop a dry
port at Cato Ridge and a logistics hub in Harrismith.
Movement on these national infrastructure projects is, however,
glacial. The mooted date for a high-speed rail is 2025, by which year automotive
trend analysts agree the world will have long grown used to seeing Volvo’s and
Scania’s self-driving trucks slipstreaming each other in the slow lanes of
highways; while families going on holiday will be able to compare prices of
renting one of Google’s self-steering cars versus taking a Komatsu taxi-train.
The predicted rise in the number of trucks on the N3 comes to 10
million container trucks a year in the next 25 years, which equates to a
nose-to-bumper queue of trucks stretching for more than 300 km along the N3 each
day.
Europe has even more trucks congesting its highways, which is why
companies like Volvo and Scania have successfully tested “platooning” their
trucks, with one driver leading at least three trucks in close proximity down a
highway.
Volvo demonstrated how it works in 2009, covering 200 km in one day
in Spain, with two trucks and three cars moving autonomously behind the leader
at 90 km/h, each five metres apart. Scania is now working on changing the dated
European laws that prohibit self-driving trucks on Europe’s highways. They hope
to deploy such trucks by 2018.
In Japan, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development
Organisation did a similar test with a convoy of Nissan trucks, which were
spaced only four metres apart to save 15% in diesel by using the trucks’
slipstream.
SA drivers will say they have long been platooning on the slower
sections of SA’s highways and can do it cheaper than any robot truck that has to
be equipped with military-spec GPS systems and laser-radars.
The bad news for these drivers is that the giant robot trucks have
already surpassed the humans, and even with the complex navigational equipment,
the trucks work out cheaper because they can run 24 hours a day without driver
error causing damage.
Komatsu have since 2001 deployed self-driving trucks at open pit
mines in the world’s driest desert in Chile and more recently, also in
Australia’s Outback.
The giant 500-ton dump trucks move at up to 64 km/h through the
ever-changing obstacles in an open pit mine. Such is their steering precision
that a dozen giant trucks operating 24 hours a day leave only one set of tracks
around turns. In underground mines, Caterpillar reduced side-wall collisions to
zero using self-driving loader vehicles.
The U.S. army has also demonstrated several self-driving truck
systems, the latest was last week at Fort Hood in Texas, where the army tested a
$11 million (around R118 million) “Autonomous Mobility Applique System” designed
by Lockheed Martin.
Ten years ago, Oskosh entered a fully autonomous 6x6 Terramax truck
in the 2004 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) race. Top
Gear’s James May raced against the Terramax in a Range Rover and only
managed to beat it by cheating.
The only hope SA long-distance drivers have of keeping their jobs
in the next 20 years is if local hauliers baulk at the price of autonomous
driving systems, and rather opt for a cheaper solution — to drive the trucks “on
a leash”. Designed by Autonomous Solutions Inc for the U.S. Army’s use in
Afghanistan, the leash is made from bomb-proof Kevlar, with sensors that relay
the distance, direction and speed so that the self-driving trucks follow the
leader in a precise path. Officially called the Guideline Robotic System, “the
leash” has been tested by General Dynamics Robotic Systems in convoys of up to
10 trucks following a human driver travelling at 64 km/h over rough terrain.
