Otto, a Team of Google Veterans, Manufacturing Self-Driving Trucks
A pair of Google alumni are leading a group of 40 Silicon Valley veterans from companies like Apple, Tesla, Cruise Automation, Uber, among others to form a new company called Otto with the chief aim of building self-driving freight trucks. The company's core founding members are ex-Google employees such as Lior Ron of Google Maps and Anthony Levandowski of Google's self-driving car project.
The startup initially worked on coming up with tools that enhance the level of safety when driving. Over time, the duo increasingly ventured into developing the technology that automates truck driving on high ways.
Compared to existing initiatives for autonomous driving, Otto not concerned with building an entire driverless truck but rather focusing on technology that can be fitted into freight trailers that currently run on the roads. Truck drivers will soon have enough amount of sleep breaks on long journeys while the truck runs on auto-drive, Tech Crunch reported.
"If you want to make driving safer, you address highways; if you want to address highways, you address trucks. There's nothing more impactful for society in the next decade. Highways are not equipped to handle modern times," Ron said as quoted by Popular Science.
According to New York Times, it makes a lot more sense economically if automotive engineers would first work on automating truck driving rather than putting R & D resources on passenger vehicles. As per Department of Transportation data, trucks account for 5.6 % of vehicular mileage and 9.5% of fatalities that occur on America's highways nationwide.
As per Economic Times, Otto will increase the number of trucks equipped with the necessary software and hardware contraption like sensors, lasers, and cameras so they can auto-navigate more than 220, 000 miles of highways while leaving the more complicated tasks to their human drivers. This idea is strikingly similar to auto-pilot mechanism in airplanes.
