- I spent two nights in my bed in eight months.
It takes a lot of self-control to keep that door closed,
11 hours a day.
Plain and simple, you have to dedicate yourself.
Westbound, 270, 2 wheeler, westbound 270.
You're trying to provide the country
with what it needs in a timely and efficient manner.
Is it physically taxing?
It's more mentally taxing than anything else?
You're responsible for a lot of people's safety.
- Our planet and our civilizations
are changing faster than ever before.
Join me as I travel the globe
talking to startup founders using cloud technologies
to make our world more interesting, accessible and livable.
These are the entrepreneurs that are creating
the future we will live in.
This is "Now Go Build."
The open road in the American southwest.
There's truly nothing like it.
Growing up in a big city, I was always fascinated
by the rugged individualism of the American trucker.
The sense of freedom, breathtaking views,
hauling goods from coast to coast,
and being at the center of the global supply chain.
But behind that fantasy is a deeper story
about one of the hardest jobs in America,
and an extremely complex network
of producers, manufacturers and distributors
that work together
to deliver goods to consumers around the world.
With global supply chain problems reaching its peak,
it has me wondering how cloud technology and AWS
can play a role in making trucking more efficient
and less demanding of the drivers behind the wheel.
That curiosity brought me to Arizona
where TuSimple believes autonomy to be the answer.
Lee and Brett are two supply chain experts
who bring firsthand knowledge
as to how autonomous trucking
could be the future of the global supply chain.
- My first job was driving a delivery truck.
I thought I'd drive a truck for a year
but that winded up being a 35-year career with UPS.
So got to know the supply chain
and trucking industry on the inside.
- There's much more to the trucking world
than just the truck,
it's all about supply chain and moving things around.
- That's exactly right.
It is a holistic ecosystem
that has a number of different constraints
that are attached to it,
that you're always looking for optimized networks
and how we can keep product moving
and make our service commitments.
- Yeah.
- For 20 years
I worked at one of North America's
largest trucking companies,
and really there I got to learn a lot about drivers
and the network of freight.
How does the freight work together?
- What most people don't understand is
97% of companies in the trucking industry
have 20 trucks or less.
It is a very fragmented industry.
- So what are the biggest challenges these days
in the world of trucking?
- American Trucking Association says
right now that there's a shortage of 80,000 drivers.
Over the next 10 years
we'll increase that shortage
well over a hundred thousand more.
Some of these firms have over a hundred percent turnover.
If you buy a product,
there's an 87% chance that that came on a truck.
If you don't have a truck driver, that truck's not moving.
And the challenge is the type of work it is.
- I mean, we have this very romantic view
about the American truck driver and,
[mimics horn]
but that's a pretty hard job.
- The typical over the road driver
is gonna spend 7 to 12 days away from home,
come back home
and then two days later go do that same thing again.
What we think technology does
is opens up a door to improve that work-life balance
and bring in some drivers
that are really focused on local applications,
consistent jobs, first mile
making the pickup, making the delivery.
By having that middle mile done autonomously
you create more jobs,
where we're gonna need more drivers
doing that local delivery work and that pickup work
because you're always going to have the driver
in that part of the ecosystem.
- So it's not just that you replace drivers with technology.
You create a new job market,
people that actually do want to drive a truck
but would like to be home at night.
Plus the expertise of the driver is really
in the first and the last mile.
- Yeah, when you look at the professional truck driver
there's a craft that they perform
and so there's an experience element
that you can't really replace.
We will be able to transition jobs
from that middle mile component,
from that unknown of where I'm going to be every day,
to a forced multiplication of first and last mile jobs
which we believe are the jobs
that this next generation of driver is really wanting.
- I think autonomous trucking
is gonna be the most transformative event
that's hit the supply chain in decades.
- But just how does a 40-ton truck drive itself?
I popped the hood with Ersin and Graham,
to see how they develop a commercially ready,
fully autonomous driving solution.
So this is where you guys build your trucks?
- This is where we bring our base trucks
and then we outfit them with our technology, our sensors.
This is what we go on the road with.
- Impressive.
- There is no OEM that will create or produce trucks
with the sensors, with the compute on them.
We start putting in all the sensors,
power that's needed to support the compute.
- With the power, with the cameras, with sensors,
around 2,000 feet of cabling
go into the truck. - Oh wow.
- And they come with the sleeper,
the bed, the fridges, everything in.
So when they come in, we take all that out,
and then install all our equipment.
There's short range lidars on each side of the truck.
On the front where the hood mirrors used to be,
we added a short range lidar to each side.
- And those two for this side
and the symmetric version of them on the other side
cover the local vicinity around the truck,
becomes extremely important
where there are pedestrians
that can actually come close to the truck.
The rack that you see at the top
all the cameras specifically placed at that point,
and our long range lidar is also on top of that rack.
As you can imagine that visibility is really strong
towards the forward of the truck.
- So what am I seeing here?
- The power distribution board with the equalizers on here
taking all of the harnessing from the batteries
equalizes it and converts it into power
that the compute unit can use inside the truck.
- So the power is required to run those servers
in the back of the truck
as well as power up everything else.
But the cameras are 4K and and they are very high bandwidth.
So all of that data is coming to the compute
and has to be realtime processed, right?
A lot of GPU processing, deep learning.
- So there's a significant amount of networking in-
- In the truck as well. - In the truck as well.
- Yes, even the connectivity with the cloud
because we do have collaborative mapping, right?
Emergency situations, roadside assistance,
roadside blockage.
All of this information is pulled to the cloud
and pulled back down
to the trucks that are on the same lane.
- Truck drivers have one of the highest rates
of on-the-job injury in America.
The ability for an autonomous truck
to send and receive data in real time
ensures a safer and more efficient journey.
Beyond the sensors on these vehicles
sits a complex set of technologies
including deep learning, real-time analytics,
GPU processing, all running in the cloud.
Ersin introduced me to Robert
to discuss the autonomous process
and how real-time mapping plays a role.
- I ended up leading engineering
for a company that was a pioneer in building HD maps.
That was the first excursion
into lidar-based, high-definition maps.
And then I led
the autonomous driving effort for mapping for TomTom
and then that led me to come here.
- So guys, can you give me a sort of view
of all the different components
and how they're stitched together?
- Of course.
What the hardware essentially is giving
to the software in the truck, is the sensor data.
The sensor data goes into our
autonomy software
where there are specific big building blocks.
One of them is perception.
And perception is essentially taking the raw sensor data
and turns that into metadata about what's around us.
- So perception basically makes sense
of what the objects are around it
and they move the objects into the prediction engine.
- Correct.
After that, that goes into planning,
based on the prediction of that future
plans our trajectory around those obstacles.
The last part,
controls, taking that trajectory
and speed profile information,
turns that into the actuator information
and sends it back to the truck
so that the truck can steer, accelerate, so on and so forth.
One of the things
that actually support this entire pieces of software
that are stitched together as autonomy
is localization and the HD map.
- What is the HD map?
We source from the environment through all of our sensors.
And what we're after on the other side
is a very tiny, compressed representation of the environment
that this module can use.
We take this data, we move it up into Amazon's S3,
then we have a process involving microservices,
at the end produces a encoded map.
So that's the process that we have to originate a map.
The process that keeps the map up to date
receives snippets of data from one of these truck runs,
the actual truck runs that's consuming the map.
The outcome of this
is that we make a sliver change to the map
and it's updated to the vehicles that are in operation.
- You want every truck in the neighborhood to know,
that there is an accident at this moment on the road.
- Exactly.
This one originates the baseline for the map,
this one keeps it live, fresh, up to date.
- Yeah, okay.
- And another place that we use this data
is updating our simulation libraries, right?
Our software runs millions of miles in some cases
on the cloud before it is even approved for the roads.
There is another side of that.
The state information and health information
through our trucks in the network,
pushing that data to the cloud
and then presenting it in dashboards
of what we call TuConnect,
to either the customer side
or the operational centers on our internal side.
- [AI voice] Autonomous driving started.
- So we're coming up to our unprotected left turn.
I see a pedestrian off to the right.
The traffic signal is red, so we are stopped.
I see one car
across the intersection
that we'll have to yield to once the light is green.
All right, so the traffic signal has turned green.
We need to wait until it's entirely clear
before we can make our unprotected left-hand turn.
Our trucks are infinitely patient.
- Yeah. - So we are taking this turn
slow and wide.
- Don't you love it when it just works?
- Yeah.
- Normally a driver would just have tons of experience
knowing how to guess
whether these cars are going too fast or not.
Here you have to luxury of data.
- Yes, it is all of the sensors
at the same time sort of overlapping the data.
This is what the lidar is picking up right now
as we're driving.
Lidar is good for about 200 meters.
So it's not the lidar that allows us
to see a thousand meters,
it's a combination of many things, especially the cameras.
How we've placed them and how we use them
is what allows us to see farther than
any other autonomous vehicle.
- Yeah, of course.
- And now our exit has come up,
we have disengaged,
we're going to make a U-turn
get back on the 10 and head back.
- Boom, wonderful.
You guys build a fantastic product.
How do you see this going
in the coming, let's say 3, 4, 5 years?
- The thing that I deeply believe
is that we're on the verge of a massive transformation
of global logistics and coordination.
And the perturbation caused by COVID
brought about the weaknesses in the system
and really a global supply chain system,
needs reliability and resilience.
And automation in many aspects of it
are going to restore our logistics
and provide a foundation
of how products move about the globe.
- By converting the middle mile to autonomy,
and no driver trucks essentially,
that will make the drivers' lives also easier
and work with the technology together.
- It's not just about building an autonomous truck,
it is about building the whole network.
- That's exactly right.
It's an autonomous driver
but what it really does is expand commerce.
If you look to where we had pain during the pandemic,
seaports with more than a hundred cargo ships
that were lined up.
Even if we could have docked everyone,
we didn't have enough trucks
that would've moved that product.
The autonomous trucking solution opens up that opportunity
to increase that capacity.
You're able to run it 24 hours a day
without having that constraint
of what the human driver has to do is, I have to shut down.
If you take that out,
all of a sudden we can double what's getting moved
between these ports.
When you double the capacity
it becomes a growth catalyst that we haven't seen.
And if you think about the practical application,
produce from Southern California,
trying to get it to the grocery stores
in the state of Texas.
In the autonomous world can do it at a much faster rate.
And it's better for the consumer.
They're gonna get produce fresher
and it's gonna stay longer on the shelves,
and there's also benefits for our environment.
Because of how the technology works
we're able to operate that truck in a more efficient way
which generates over a 10% fuel economy savings.
- There's a lot of cost savings to be realized
from this technology.
Whether you're talking about fuel efficiency
or the ability to rapidly scale alternative fuels
or zero emission fuels.
From a utilization perspective,
being able to utilize that truck 24 hours a day.
Beyond that, then you start talking about optimization
and network optimization,
and then what it does to the work
on the the first and last mile
and how it will expand that category of driving job.
- As they put together that network
and they math that out,
and then here comes the autonomous driver,
that's when you're going to get these optimized networks,
it's going to increase capacity.
We're going to need more drivers, and more technicians,
and more CDL qualified people
working in that supply chain than we've needed before.
- Once again, cloud technology is driving the future
of a rapidly evolving industry.
These advances offer the potential
to revolutionize the entire trucking ecosystem,
transforming the role of the truck driver
to keep pace with an ever-changing world.
The application of AWS technologies
supports this vital industry
in their pursuit of better efficiency, safety,
and ultimately a more dependable supply chain.