Daimler Trucks acquires autonomous driving system developer to make driverless trucks?

Recently, Daimler Group officially announced that Daimler Trucks, the company's heavy-duty and medium-duty truck manufacturer, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Torc Robotics, a developer of truck autonomous driving systems.

Since commercial vehicles may enter the commercialization stage of autonomous driving earlier than passenger vehicles, the application of autonomous driving in commercial vehicles has also become an important focus of automakers. At present, there are many players involved in unmanned trucks, including TuSimple, PlusAI, and Mainline Technology in China, and Tesla, Uber, Daimler, Volvo, and Otto in foreign countries. Due to various restrictions (technology, policies, etc.), unmanned trucks are still in the testing stage.

At present, the industry's attention to self-driving trucks is mainly focused on two aspects: one is the application in completely closed scenarios such as mining areas, ports, and logistics parks. Due to the relatively closed operating environment, the type of road participants is single and the number is small, the overall vehicle speed is low, and the transportation distance is short, and the route repetition is high, it is gradually becoming a reality. The other is a semi-closed scenario consisting of an operating route consisting of a fixed highway. The road conditions in these scenarios are not as complicated as ordinary roads, and there are relatively few uncontrollable factors such as pedestrians. In the eyes of many industry insiders, it is another ideal scenario for the commercialization of autonomous driving. However, given the connection between highways and social roads, self-driving trucks still have many legal and technical issues.

Recently, Daimler Group, the world's most successful commercial vehicle manufacturer, officially announced that Daimler Trucks, a heavy-duty and medium-duty truck manufacturer under the company, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Torc Robotics, a developer of truck autonomous driving systems. Torc Robotics is an autonomous driving company founded in 2005. The strong cooperation will accelerate the commercialization of driverless trucks.

Torc: The company that understands the commercialization of autonomous driving best

In 2005, a group of Virginia Tech students designed and built three autonomous vehicles to compete in the AUVSI Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, taking the top three spots in the competition. They then modified two more autonomous vehicles to compete in the 2005 DARPA Challenge, finishing eighth and ninth after completing nearly 100 miles of autonomous driving in harsh rocky desert terrain. These results have attracted strong interest from multiple markets including automotive, mining, and defense, and in order to commercialize the technology and keep the team together, Torc Robotics was officially established.

Since the company was founded, they have been developing and thinking about how to commercialize autonomous solutions. The first partners were mining and defense. At that time, these industries were looking for ways to get humans out of danger in dangerous working conditions. For more than ten years, the Torc team has worked with Caterpillar to develop automated systems that improve workplace safety and efficiency. The two teams worked together to develop RemoteTask, a remote control system for skid steers and compact crawler loaders, and Cat Command, an autonomous driving solution. In terms of defense, off-road autonomous systems for detecting bombs have been developed.

In 2017, when more and more players in the autonomous driving car industry, such as Tesla and Waymo, made Torc feel that the autonomous driving civilian car market was coming soon, so Torc launched the autonomous driving car Asimov project with 10 years of business experience. Torc hopes to use the end-to-end software stack and ten years of multi-industry experience to enable cars to make complex decisions in real life. They modified two modified Lexus RX models and tested them in various weather conditions since February 2017.

Based on the behavioral capabilities recommended by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for autonomous driving systems, Asimov is also developing and updating the functional form of autonomous driving, sharing the necessary capabilities of autonomous driving systems from multiple perspectives such as traffic, systems, and road conditions.

It is worth mentioning that Torc has done a lot of tests in edge scenarios. Asimov has been tested in complex cities, long-distance highways, and severe weather such as snow and heavy rain in more than 20 states. Driving was successfully completed in situations such as snow covering road markings, vehicles ahead not following traffic rules, and installed cameras being blocked by rain and snow. Torc's sensor system can even distinguish snow from actual objects on the road.

As a veteran autonomous driving team, Torc has always adhered to the simplest development cycle. Through build/test/learn, it continuously researches and integrates emerging technologies, develops and tests new systems, and software and hardware requirements drive each other in a cyclical manner.

Daimler: The world's first self-driving truck

Daimler is undoubtedly the world's leading truck manufacturer and one of the companies that has invested heavily in autonomous driving. As the world's top heavy industry group, Germany's Daimler has launched two autonomous tractors in the past two years, one of which is the Freightliner Inspiration Truck, which was launched by Daimler North America and obtained the first truck autonomous driving license issued by the US government. The "highway assisted driving system" of the Inspiration Truck includes multiple cameras and radars, as well as related sensor equipment and computing hardware, and has an L2 autonomous driving level.

The other is the Mercedes-Benz Future Truck, a concept car whose autonomous driving system can distinguish between single-lane and double-lane roads, stationary objects, moving obstacles, pedestrians and other objects within range. It has also been successfully tested on the A14 highway in Magdeburg, Germany, at a speed of 80km/h.

Strong cooperation accelerates the commercialization of unmanned trucks

Currently, Daimler Trucks is the first to introduce partially automated driving functions (SAE Level 2) into series production with Active Drive Assist (Mercedes-Benz Actros, FUSO Super Great) and Detroit Assurance 5.0 with Active Lane Assist (Freightliner Cascadia). The cooperation between Daimler North America and Torc will promote the evolution of driverless trucks to a higher level of autonomy.