Walmart Will Use Fully Driverless Trucks To Make Deliveries In 2021 (theverge.com) 59
Starting in 2021, Walmart will use fully autonomous box trucks to make deliveries in Arkansas without any safety drivers in the vehicles. The Verge reports: The big-box retailer has been working with a startup called Gatik on a delivery pilot for 18 months. Gatik, which is based in Palo Alto and Toronto, outfitted several multitemperature box trucks with sensors and software to enable autonomous driving. Since last year, those trucks have been operating on a two-mile route between a "dark store" (a store that stocks items for fulfillment but isn't open to the public) and a nearby Neighborhood Market in Bentonville, Arkansas. Since then, the vehicles have racked up 70,000 miles in autonomous mode with a safety driver.
Next year, the companies intend to start incorporating fully autonomous trucks into those deliveries. And they plan on expanding to a second location in Louisiana, where trucks with safety drivers will begin delivering items from a "live" Walmart Supercenter to a designated pickup location where customers can retrieve their orders. Those routes, which will begin next year, will be longer than the Arkansas operation -- 20-miles between New Orleans and Metairie, Louisiana.
Next year, the companies intend to start incorporating fully autonomous trucks into those deliveries. And they plan on expanding to a second location in Louisiana, where trucks with safety drivers will begin delivering items from a "live" Walmart Supercenter to a designated pickup location where customers can retrieve their orders. Those routes, which will begin next year, will be longer than the Arkansas operation -- 20-miles between New Orleans and Metairie, Louisiana.
I keep hearing similar promises, but co's (Score:3)
usually pull out the last second. The liability possibilities scare the daylights out of the (potential) signers.
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usually pull out the last second. The liability possibilities scare the daylights out of the (potential) signers.
Pretty much the same liability as hiring a crackhead minimum wage to drive....
Re:I keep hearing similar promises, but co's (Score:4, Informative)
Well, no the crack head minimum wage driver still has full criminal liability and the company only has civil liability for the employee. The robot means the company has full criminal liability, the second it causes an accident for what ever reason, they are criminally liable for negligent 'well', homicide if worst comes to worst and the proof it was negligent homicide, the robot caused the accident, proof it was unsafe to deploy and criminal liability falls back on the owner and their executives. The liability is horrendous, which is why they generally kept robots in cages away from people because the criminal liability falls back on the owner, proof it was unsafe, the accident it caused, instant crime, no escape the owner operator is doomed.
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This. Plus a crackhead can go to rehab and get better. The giant "neural net" ball of bullshit that is autonomous vehicle technology? I'm not even sure it can be debugged at this point.
We've finally come far enough Walmart's seriously considering out SWIFTing a drunk SWIFT driver.
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And yet industrial accidents involving robots have been happening for decades and no executives have been held criminally liable.
Part of the robot engineering process is to distribute responsibility, and thus blame, to the point where no individual is accountable. Look at Uber, they killed someone with a prototype self driving car but the only person charged was the safety driver, the execs and engineers to designed such an unsafe system will at worst become involved in a civil damages suit that doesn't aff
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That's ridiculous -- parts fail and cause accidents all the time .. yet most of the time the vehicle manufacturer doesn't have to pay.
Re:I keep hearing similar promises, but co's (Score:4, Insightful)
The liability possibilities scare the daylights out of the (potential) signers.
SDCs have already killed people. Legal settlements were paid and the world kept on turning.
Meanwhile, HDCs kill 3000 people per day.
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there no longer is someone else to blame like uber did in AZ.
Uber blamed the driver in their PR statements. But that made no difference in the legal settlement. The unemployed driver did not contribute.
Would you want to be the CEO of the company charged with murder?
Sending people to prison for engineering flaws is idiotic.
Industrial accidents and product imperfections kill people every single day. People go to jail for those deaths only in cases of gross criminal negligence.
If you want a car that is perfectly safe it will weigh 100 tonnes, go 5 mph, and cost $10M.
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If you want a car that is perfectly safe it will weigh 100 tonnes, go 5 mph, and cost $10M.
Oh sure, until your 100 ton car crushes somebody.
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Oh sure, until your 100 ton car crushes somebody.
Solution: Reduce the maximum speed to 2 mph to give geriatric pedestrians more time to get out of the way.
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Sending people to the local jail when an self driving truck wipes out an school bus may fix stuff even more so if they draw an judge like the one in my cousin vinny that also jails people with contempt of court when they try to say the court can't have logs / source code / other docs do to an NDA or trys to say we did not make / code that part you need to track down and ask each subcontractor.
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That is the fundamental problem with the corporate system. It shields the decision makers from criminal liability. For example, Ford executives purposely ignored a dangerous problem with the Pinto because it was cheaper to pay off the settlements than it was to issue a recall and fix the problem. How would they have handled it if they could have been charged with multiple counts of manslaughter?
When a board of directors can get away with saying "let them fucking die, it's a good business decision", there
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When a board of directors can get away with saying "let them fucking die, it's a good business decision," there is something inherently wrong with the system
No there isn't. There is an inherent tradeoff between safety and cost. They can ALWAYS make a product safer by spending more.
Unless you want to spend an extra $1M because your house comes with a titanium meteor shield, you need to accept some risk. You also need to accept that people running businesses will sometimes make decisions based on incomplete or flawed information that may look foolish in hindsight. Sending people to prison for mistakes means we will have to pay CEOs a lot more and live with mu
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This isn't a trade-off between cost and safety. This was them discovering they had a serious problem and not doing anything about it. Engineering flaws happen. No disputing that. But when you discover an engineering problem that is going to get people killed, you don't ignore the problem. You fucking fix it. I didn't say throw them in prison because a problem popped up. I'm saying throw them in prison if they know there is a fatal design flaw and choose to do nothing.
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It can happen, but only for intentional harm or gross negligence (YMMV, it will depend on the jurisdiction). My boss used to work in the Soviet Union, and there they would regularly jail professional engineers or their bosses for deadly mistakes.
we just sub it out to an small 1099'er who has no (Score:3)
we just sub it out to an small 1099'er who has no real control or franchise each store but we have an mcdonalds level control in where the franchise has little to no control
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The liability possibilities scare the daylights out of the (potential) signers.
SDCs have already killed people. Legal settlements were paid and the world kept on turning.
Meanwhile, HDCs kill 3000 people per day.
Yes, 3,000 across the world die each day in car accidents. On average, 100 people per day [worldatlas.com] die in a vehicle accident in the U.S.
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That's because they are in the R&D stage where bleeding funds is expected. Whether SDC can be profitable as an ongoing business with such lawsuits is another matter.
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Maybe they'll switch a the tried and tested solution: pneumatic tubes.
Just call it the hyperloop and it'll be good as gold!
Getting package to door (Score:3)
Getting the package from the truck to the door will be difficult. How are they going to solve that? Robots? Drones? Trebuchet?
Re:Getting package to door (Score:5, Informative)
Getting the package from the truck to the door will be difficult.
These trucks are not for residential deliveries.
They are for deliveries from distribution centers to individual stores.
How are they going to solve that? Robots? Drones? Trebuchet?
The stores have loading docks and forklifts. The forklifts may be automated in the future.
No drone can lift a pallet.
A trebuchet would cause excessive damage to the merchandise.
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These trucks are not for residential deliveries. so they will be doing 40-70 MPH vs 25 MPH
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No drone can lift a pallet.
Give it time. Cars used to not be able to drive themselves.
A trebuchet would cause excessive damage to the merchandise.
Remember all those egg drop experiments during science week in grade school? Wrap the egg so it falls and doesn't break? Now we have a practical purpose.
Give it time.
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Other robots could stock the shelves, and other robots could work as checkout machines.
Other robots would come into the store to buy goods. Finally, top-levels robots would pay all the other robots.
It's a R-rr-r-rovolution!
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Getting the package from the truck to the door will be difficult. How are they going to solve that? Robots? Drones? Trebuchet?
Clearly the win-win solution is to retrain some of the out of work truck drivers as trebuchet loaders and launchers, while you train the rest how to write code.
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From TFA:
. . . we are able to hyper-optimize our models with exponentially less data . . .
Considering that "hyper-optimize" is not a thing and "exponentially less" is meaningless, I guess they'll achieve the last steps with business babble.
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oh, just stop complaining and go proactively leverage your synergies
Can You See This More Than a Tech Thing (Score:2)
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I'm all for modern technology freeing up our time from grunt-work. That's what the future is supposed to bring. The problem is that our current economic system is not built for that and too many are afraid to experiment.
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Like 99% of technology, this system employees more people and for better jobs.
Building, and maintaining robots are better jobs than.
There is a small temporary loss as people have to learn new skills.
But the ability to deliver things cheaper results in economies of scale that increase the number of deliveries, resulting in more purchases.
Same thing happened when cars replaced horses and buggies. And when looms replaced human sewers.
Etc etc. etc.
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And when looms replaced human sewers.
Imagine being a professional sewer. Talk about dirty work.
learn new skills make school loan free then (Score:2)
learn new skills make school loan free then or make it so that loans are income based and can be gotten rid of after X years
Re:Can You See This More Than a Tech Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we really need to send more people to the unemployment lines?
Yes. Productivity improvements are the key to prosperity. People need to be moved to jobs where they add more value. That causes temporary unemployment, but everyone is better off in the long run.
Many countries have avoided automation, including Somalia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. Do you think they are more prosperous than us because they "kept their jobs"?
Should we outlaw flush toilets to employ more chambermaids? Should we require ditch diggers to us teaspoons instead of shovels? In years hence, employing people to drive trucks will seem just as silly.
Re:Can You See This More Than a Tech Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we really need to send more people to the unemployment lines?
Yes. Productivity improvements are the key to prosperity. People need to be moved to jobs where they add more value. That causes temporary unemployment, but everyone is better off in the long run.
Many countries have avoided automation, including Somalia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. Do you think they are more prosperous than us because they "kept their jobs"?
Should we outlaw flush toilets to employ more chambermaids? Should we require ditch diggers to us teaspoons instead of shovels? In years hence, employing people to drive trucks will seem just as silly.
Wow. Talk about cherry-picking data!
Somalia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan are poor because they don't have automation? Really? The bombs and the endless civil wars are not the main issue?
Productivity improvements are the key to prosperity. People need to be moved to jobs where they add more value
This is true if there are such jobs to move them to. Naturally, Walmart view that as someone else's problem, which is the capitalist way: privatise profit and socialise your pollution. Why flush the toilet when the next person will, as Steve jobs would say.
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Do we really need to send more people to the unemployment lines?
Yes. Productivity improvements are the key to prosperity. People need to be moved to jobs where they add more value. That causes temporary unemployment, but everyone is better off in the long run.
Many countries have avoided automation, including Somalia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. Do you think they are more prosperous than us because they "kept their jobs"?
Should we outlaw flush toilets to employ more chambermaids? Should we require ditch diggers to us teaspoons instead of shovels? In years hence, employing people to drive trucks will seem just as silly.
The real beneficiaries of productivity improvements are the share-holders, the executives, and, very occasionally (when lower prices occur) the consumer. Any "trickle-down" to the level of the employees displaced is accidental and unintended.
Education and a minimum level of political stability are the proven egalitarian keys to prosperity. The countries you list as avoiding automation have serious and systemic education challenges, thanks in large part to long-term political problems. Combined, poor educati
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The real beneficiaries of productivity improvements are the share-holders
The majority of common stock in America is owned by middle-class pension funds.
very occasionally (when lower prices occur) the consumer.
Is that why consumers in America, Europe, and Japan are no better off than those in Guinea, Mozambique, and Haiti?
Re:Can You See This More Than a Tech Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
well when it's better in the joint then the street (Score:2)
well when it's better in the joint then the street the wallmart will get looted and it's win win for the looter and lose lose for the tax payer
Twenty miles? HOW??? (Score:1)
Did they use Mapquest or something?
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New Orleans and Metairie are neighboring towns! They share a border! How in the heck did they figure out a 20-mile route between the two?
Did they use Mapquest or something?
I had to look this up to see if you weren't exaggerating. According to Google Maps, the shortest route is 6.2 miles via US 61. The longest is 8.4 miles via I-10 W. So yeah, how do they get 20 miles out of the trip? Are they using back roads? Even accounting for a round-trip, they don't get to 20 miles.
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New Orleans and Metairie are neighboring towns! They share a border! How in the heck did they figure out a 20-mile route between the two?
Did they use Mapquest or something?
I had to look this up to see if you weren't exaggerating. According to Google Maps, the shortest route is 6.2 miles via US 61. The longest is 8.4 miles via I-10 W. So yeah, how do they get 20 miles out of the trip? Are they using back roads? Even accounting for a round-trip, they don't get to 20 miles.
Warehouse to retail location are usually semi-trailer movements. Unlike smaller residential delivery trucks, semi's do not, and sometimes cannot, always take the "shortest" route as indicated in Google Maps or MapQuest, old-school paper maps or whatever. Challenges like low underpasses, weight limits and many other forms of road restrictions, along with existing traffic patterns, come into play, and are all part of the process in finding the optimum route rather than just the shortest.
At this point in time,
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If it's shit you want I'm with ya! (Score:4, Funny)
Cost Reductions (Score:2)
From Walmart [walmart.com]: "Walmart drivers earn an average of $87,500 per year, and this year, it's getting better for all drivers by way of increases in per mile rate and activity pay and training pay. One of the biggest differences from other driving companies is Walmart drivers get paid in more ways than mileage pay."
Bring back the 'highwaymen' (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong?
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If there were so many people out there willing to rob robotic trucks on the highway, surely they'd already be robbing trucks driven by humans? It's not like the driver is going to put up a fight to defend the precious, precious cargo they're hauling for Walmart.
Anyways, a self-driving vehicle is basically a roving surveillance van. Robbing one of those is probably more risky for the criminal - not less.
Retarded (1) meet Ass (2). Ass, meet Retarded (Score:2)
Citations:
1) https://www.theverge.com/platf... [theverge.com]
2)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
My BS meter is pegged (Score:2)
So there human drivers get promoted to robots. (Score:2)
This could mean a cut in pay. Unionize the teamster robots.
Perfect pilot state (Score:2)