A day doesn’t go by without self-driving cars hitting the headlines, with Honda the latest company to reveal its plans — the Japanese carmaker wants autonomous vehicles on city roads by 2025.
But long before they hit conurbations around the world, we’re already seeing an uptick in self-driving vehicles used for very specific, niche scenarios. Volvo is one such company that has been ramping up its efforts to test autonomous vehicles in industries to improve speed, safety, and efficiency.
The Swedish automotive giant’s latest effort is a self-steering truck that’s being trialled to help sugarcane plantations avoid damaging young crop, thereby increasing their yield. Sugarcane is among the world’s largest crop in terms of the quantity produced — large trucks typically drive alongside the harvester at low-speed to transport the crop off-site, however as much as 4 percent can be lost as fledgling crop is trampled by the truck. This, ultimately, is due to human error — which is why Volvo is working toward automating the process.
Above: Volvo Self-Steering Truck
The Usina Santa Terezinha Group produces sugarcane crop in the southern Brazilian municipality of Maringá, from which it makes sugar and ethanol.
During the past harvest, the company has served as a test-bed for Volvo’s autonomous efforts, which involves a driver assistance system that automates steering. It’s basically designed to ensure that the truck maintains a precise course at all times, using coordinate-based digital maps and GPS to traverse the field — gyroscopes ensure that the truck never deviates more than 25mm from its pre-determined course.
Above: Volvo truck: Navigation
It’s worth noting here that there is still a driver inside the truck, who can accelerate or decelerate manually or with the aid of an on-board cruise control, but the point of the exercise is to free the driver from having to concentrate on the steering which can be exhausting and error-prone — all he or she has to worry about is the speed of the vehicle.
Above: Inside the truck
“With this solution we will soon be able to significantly increase the productivity of our customers in the sugarcane industry,” noted Volvo Group’s Latin America VP Wilson Lirmann. “At the same time, we will improve their drivers’ working conditions and safety. This in turn will make the job more appealing, and make it easier to recruit and maintain drivers.”
The Brazil trial follows hot on the heels of similar autonomous trials elsewhere in the world. Last year, Volvo announced it was testing a self-driving truck in underground mines in Sweden, while a few weeks back it kicked off an autonomous garbage truck trial too.
Ultimately, the tests are about evaluating “degrees of automation,” as Volvo puts it, and how it can enhance productivity.
While self-driving car trials are ongoing throughout the world, it will likely be a long time before fully self-driving automobiles are commonplace. But Volvo’s recent industry “experiments” are more than that — many of them could progress to permanence in the near future. The Brazilian sugarcane trial will be expanded to include more vehicles being field-tested this summer, with commercial availability following “in the foreseeable future.”
