Cloud Powers Autonomous Freight Truck System Designed to Cut Environmental Impact

商业货运运输基本食品，消费品，建筑材料和许多其他商品。它推动了整个大陆的经济。尽管如此，与几乎所有其他行业一样，货运运输仍在破坏数据技术。

仅在美国，卡车移动71.5％of all freight tonnage, according to the American Trucking Associations (ATA), hauling everything from food, water and clothing to building supplies, fuel and medicine.

“Without trucks,”ATA说, “America stops.”

但是，卡车运输对经济型的帮助，对世界各地的环境有害。

“Carbon dioxide emissions are threatening the future of mankind,” said Ohlson.

He said road freight transport is responsible for 5–7 percent of global CO2 emissions and that’s growing. He knows why.

“A lack of cost-competitive sustainable alternatives,” Ohlson said.

That’s about to change with the Einride Autonomous Electric Transport (AET), a road freight ecosystem that encompasses order and fleet management platforms, self-driving and remote-control technology and autonomous electric vehicles. The whole system relies on cloud-based infrastructure.

奥尔森说：“我们正在从头开始重新思考道路货物。”

Cutting the Cabin

Einride是Robert Falck, who started the company in 2016 after nearly six years of leading the production of heavy-duty truck engines at Volvo Trucks. Falck became increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of his work. Diesel engines are responsible for a significant part of carbon dioxide emissions, and he knew technology had progressed to make electrically-powered road freight possible. His ideas were too radical for Volvo, so he left to start his own company.

Falck希望通过卸下驾驶员的驾驶室来使卡车更轻，更便宜，更可持续，这占常规卡车的生产成本的一半，同时增加了车辆的重量。添加电动推进和电池系统将使其不切实际。

Ohlson说：“没有驾驶室，“您会得到一辆较小，更轻，更灵活的车辆，使我们能够全电动。”

Einride用自动驾驶和遥控技术的组合代替了驾驶室。

“There’ll always be an operator in the distance, supervising up to 10 vehicles at once, able to take control if a vehicle finds itself in a situation it can’t handle,” Ohlson said.

Einride has unveiled two autonomous electric trucks: the T-pod – a 23-foot-long cab-less vehicle that can carry 15 standard pallets and travel 124 miles on a single electric charge – and the T-log, a version of the T-pod made explicitly for logging. The former is in the middle of its first commercial rollouts at German logistics company DB Schenker and German grocery chain Lidl. And Einride continues to在公共道路上测试车辆in Sweden.

A Transportation Tipping Point

While its autonomous trucks may look like vehicles from a science fiction novel, the most revolutionary part of Einride’s AET system doesn’t happen on the road – it lives in the cloud.
Einride提供了全堆栈，即服务解决方案，这意味着它可以控制从订单管理，车队管理和自动驾驶系统到实际硬件的所有内容。

Einride’s holistic approach is to treat the system as a finished puzzle instead of individual pieces.

“Integrate order and fleet management into one digital platform, design it for autonomous and electric trucks, and what you end up with is an extremely competitive solution,” Ohlson said.

尽管T-POD和T-LOG在电力上运行，但较大的AET系统运行了为系统提供启动的数据，包括客户数据，流量数据和环境数据。后者是从车辆安装的传感器中收获的，包括雷达，激光镜头和摄像头，然后可以检测到其他车辆，道路障碍物，车道标记和交通标志。所有这些都由操作系统融合在一起，该操作系统根据拥塞，电池寿命，能耗和交付时间等因素来确定最有效的交付路线。

It results in cargo transport that’s faster, more affordable and sustainable, something impossible without cloud computing, Ohlson said.

“Cloud is vital for Einride; it affects every part of the system,” he said. “We push all data from all digital platforms to the same logging system, which makes the data query-able. Also, collecting the data in the systems allows us to set alerts for anomalies in any level of the software stack. We use Docker [to build and test software] in the cloud.”

He said major parts of the vehicle software look very similar to a modern cloud setup.

他说：“这更像是本地云，而不是在车辆中运行的传统服务器。”

Ohlson认为，该公司的进步只是大型货运长途卡车运输的拐点的第一步。

他说：“云等不同领域的指数技术开发使得基于自动驾驶电动汽车的安全，成本效益和可持续的运输解决方案成为可能。”

“有机会改变我们现在正在发生的道路运输运输。”

Matt Alderton is a contributing writer who specializes in business, culture, science, technology and travel. Find him on Twitter@AldertonWrites.

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