Gridlock Guy: Driverless big rig company claims simulation as good as road test

Imagine a world with driverless tractor trailers hauling heavy cargo at freeway speeds and mixed in amongst the lousy drivers in Atlanta traffic. Now imagine that autonomous technology’s testing has been mostly in a simulated environment. That is exactly what Canadian robotruck startup Waabi is claiming they can do.

Founded in 2021 by Raquel Urtasun, who formerly headed Uber’s driverless-vehicle effort, Waabi says its simulator tool virtually matches the real road testing they have been doing with robotrucks.

That sounds unfathomable, as traffic is so unpredictable. But data collection and recreation has come a long way.

Urtasun says, in an interview with Transport Topics, that the freight traffic environment is arguably safer and faces fewer variables than, say, Waymo’s driverless cabs in urban settings. This is because freeways are in wider spaces, with straighter lines, and in far more predictable situations. There are fewer pedestrians, bikes, and road-blocking events on interstates.

But, of course, there are still many variables — and higher speeds.

Waabi uses real data from its physical trucks; the behemoths they are testing along freeways are laden with cameras and sensors to both measure the driving software’s accuracy on the road and to feed info to the simulation. With Waabi World now fixed up with the exact route that a real driverless truck took, engineers can launch the virtual version of the autonomous program in this environment.

Waabi World is 99.7% accurate, the startup says. Put another way, Urtasun told Tranport Topics that if a truck is moving 30 meters per second, Waabi World can be accurate within 10 centimeters.

And here is where the simulation can pass the real world product: engineers can create and control variables.

Urtasun wrote in a blog for Waabi: “Life-threatening accidents happen roughly once for every 10 million miles that are driven by humans; a fatality is roughly once every 100 million miles. Considering that a human-driven truck, at best, covers 100,000 miles annually, it would take a fleet of 1,000 trucks an entire year to potentially encounter just one such event. Recreating dangerous scenarios for testing purposes is not an alternative and is also ethically problematic and often practically impossible.”

A simulation, however, can produce weather, delays, debris, and human driver errors in surrounding cars, on-demand. Then engineers can grade how the autonomous driver reacts.

By controlling these variables, engineers can dramatically decrease the amount of time needed to expose their driverless software to obstacles. That makes this nearly seamlessly similar simulation more efficient and effective than road tests.

There is no secret about how conveniently — and eerily — accurate A.I. has become. This begs the question of how the application of driving simulators could improve all drivers.

Use of simulators prior to driving in real life could be on the horizon much faster than regular drivers themselves being replaced by autonomous technology.

As for driverless big rigs being used locally, that timetable is unknown. A Waabi spokesperson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Waabi is already partnering with Uber Freight to move loads with its driverless software - with a human supervisor on board - in stretches near Dallas and Houston, Texas. They also have plans to add more routes in the Lone Star State.

Waabi has made the case that the trucking industry is a good place to innovate autonomous vehicles and its cutting edge simulation to test it. The trucking industry is predicting a shortage of 80,000 drivers by 2030, Waabi says.

And they believe their simulation and driving technology can be of use in the aforementioned robotaxi industry and with regular human drivers, too.

Skepticism will certainly be rampant and rightfully so. But given how much human error factors into crashes and how grueling the trucking lifestyle is, this technology is getting bigger in the rearview mirror and is pulling up to make a pass.

Doug Turnbull has covered Atlanta traffic for over 20 years and written “Gridlock Guy” since 2017. Doug also co-hosts the “Five to Go Podcast,” a weekly deep dive on stories in motorsports. Contact him at fireballturnbull@gmail.com.