Plus.ai, a Silicon Valley-based provider of self-driving trucking technology, announced this month that it has completed the first coast-to-coast commercial freight run with an autonomous truck on behalf of Land O’Lakes.
Spanning 2,800 miles from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania in less than three days right before Thanksgiving, the company said the hub-to-hub trip was the first L4 U.S. cross-country commercial pilot hauling a fully-loaded refrigerated trailer of perishable cargo.
The truck — hauling 40,000 pounds of Land O’ Lakes Butter products — was equipped with Plus.ai’s advanced autonomous driving system that utilizes multimodal sensor fusion, deep learning visual algorithms, and simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) technologies.
The 3-year-old company states that the journey was an important milestone in validating the system’s ability to handle a wide range of weather and road conditions, as it drove primarily in autonomous mode across Interstate 15 and Interstate 70. A safety driver was on board throughout the trip to monitor and assume control if needed, and a safety engineer was present to monitor system operations.
“This cross-country freight run with Land O’Lakes shows the safety, efficiency, and maturity of our autonomous trucks, which are already delivering freight for other partners several days a week,” Plus.ai chief operating officer and co-founder Shawn Kerrigan said in a press release. “Continued advances in our autonomous trucks will make it possible for these quick cross-country runs to be the norm in the future. We are excited to demonstrate what our technology can already achieve today while meeting rigorous autonomous driving safety and food transportation compliance standards.”
Kerrigan told the San Jose Mercury News that the truck had to take scheduled breaks, but that there were zero times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem.
Cupertino, California-based Pius.ai had already been running autonomous freight trips every week for about a year, but the 2,800-mile trek was the first cross-country trip and partnership that it has discussed publicly.
“On its continuous cross-country journey, the Plus.ai autonomous truck safely navigated driving day and night through the expansive plains of Kansas, winding roads of the Rockies, road construction, multi-mile tunnels, over 11,000 feet elevation, and was greeted with rainy and snowy roads heading east, all in under three days,” the company said. “This is a powerful demonstration of the safety and efficiency that can be achieved when autonomous trucks become commercially available.”
