AEV Summit: Locomation on path to full autonomy

Company's convoy technology brings goal closer to reality

(Photo: FreightWaves)

This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Autonomous & Electric Vehicles Summit.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Critical opportunities on the path to full autonomy

DETAILS: Locomation is a leader in the autonomous space and has a human-guided autonomy solution to aid its clients on the path to full autonomy. Çetin Meriçli, joins FreightWaves President George Abernathy to share updates and discuss the potential operational and financial benefits of adopting this solution and what Locomation sees as the multistep path to fully autonomous trucking.

SPEAKER: Meriçli is the co-founder and CEO of Locomation.

BIO: Meriçli has co-founded and advised multiple startups and led teams of researchers and commercialization experts at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center in the past. His robotics and machine learning experience has placed his work in more than 40 scientific publications.

Key quotes from Meriçli:

“Combining the best of both properties of expert human drivers and machines with their superhuman reaction times today enables us to offer a fully autonomous solution in the form of human-guided convoying years ahead of time and use that solution to further perfect and further validate our autonomous technology for larger-scale and fully autonomous deployments in the future.”

“Our first product called Autonomous Relay Convoy is a two-truck, two-driver system where two drivers basically can take a convoy of two trucks on the move almost around the clock. One [is] driving at a given time and the other one is taking a rest. … The same number of trucks and the same number of drivers now can do twice the work, and in an environment where capacity is really short, this is a game changer.”

“It all starts with knowing how safe is safe enough — what it means to be safe. … We are being extremely rigorous internally and extremely transparent externally. When we are talking to our customers or future prospects, we are working them through how we are approaching this problem.”

Click here for more FreightWaves articles by Alyssa Sporrer.

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Alyssa Sporrer

Alyssa is a staff writer at FreightWaves, covering sustainability news in the freight and supply chain industry, from low-carbon fuels to social sustainability, emissions & more. She graduated from Iowa State University with a double major in Marketing and Environmental Studies. She is passionate about all things environmental and enjoys outdoor activities such as skiing, ultimate frisbee, hiking, and soccer.