According to Bloomberg News, robots will replace humans in almost all dangerous jobs soon, and trucking will not be far behind. As of now, autonomous driving engineers are focusing on long-haul freights, and infrastructure as probably the biggest obstacle. The short distance covered right from a distribution center or factory to the interstate is usually more complex than the next hundred miles to be covered.
Bloomberg News reports one of the solutions for the trucking companies might be that these trucking companies can set up transfer stations at both ends, where it is seen that the human drivers manage the first tricky leg of the trip followed by hitching the cargo up to the robots rigs to meet the tiresome portion of the work in the middle. And if there is another station at the leaving point, it would flip back the freight into an analog truck for delivery.
Such an arrangement or a system, as per a new study from the University of Michigan, such an arrangement or a system might replace approximately 90% of the human drivers driving in the United States long-haul trucks, which is equivalent to almost 500,000 jobs.
More need for drivers
The demand index for the trucking market measures the ratio of the cargo to the available trucks, and that has been on a record high. But a bunch of “ifs” still exist. However, there is one aspect that they need to consider, and that is how well they will be able to navigate the crummy weather in the autonomous systems as they are doing so now.
Secondly, many regulators in some states have not cleared the idea of robot rigs. Moreover, the infrastructure must be considered as well, namely the from all the transfer stations where the cargo might pass to the algorithms from the caffeine-fueled analog.
However, Bloomberg News reports that if the trucking companies could focus on America’s Sun Belt, it would be possible to offset at least 10% of human driving, as per a study if these companies decide to make use of the robots across the nation but only in the warmer months, that would make the country’s 50% of the trucking hours autonomous.
However, it is no surprise that the long-haul labor force now tends to make a turn every 12 months or so. At present, the industry is starved of at least 61,000 drivers.
The shortage of drivers in America is so dire that the trucking companies are also planning to import drivers to ease the pains of the current supply chain disruptions.
