Determinism in future cars: Why autonomous trucks are easier to design

Abstract

In the last decade we started seeing a major paradigm shift in automotive industry as some safety challenge in vehicles could be improved by using autonomous vehicles. Designing autonomous trucks, due to special features in their operations could be easier than autonomous cars. The behavior of autonomous truck is more predictable, they work on specific routes according to predictable schedule and they can avoid traffic, problem areas, or at least optimize their driving schedule. This structured behavior follows a more deterministic approach of developing the vehicle, and hence could greatly simplify the implementation model from that of personal vehicles. Additionally, we could get better performance in domain of safety as autonomous driving software could be made to follow a more restricted driving approach. Unlike human truck drivers, autonomous trucks will not suffer from fatigue or illness, a contributing factor to truck-related accidents.