(Emily Warren) Most people don't think about logistics or goods movement
unless they're passing a truck on the highway.
But the reality is
that trucking is the plumbing of our economy.
(Brandon Moak) Currently there exists a driver shortage
on the order of 80,000,
and we expect that to double by 2030.
We think that automated technology is one of the ways
we can solve this problem
by making the trucking industry a lot more efficient.
(Sarah Houts) Right now, drivers have breaks.
They need to eat.
They need to go to the bathroom.
They need to sleep.
An autonomous system will be able to
keep going indefinitely.
(Warren) There is a need to make our logistics system safer,
more sustainable, and more reliable
because when it doesn't work, it affects everyone every day.
(gentle music)
(Moak) Embark is a self-driving trucking company.
We're working on software that's able to drive trucks
from point A to point B on highways
to move freight for logistics companies,
shippers, and carriers.
So we're not here to automate out
all of the jobs that do exist.
Our mission is to automate the long-haul portion
which is the most taxing and demanding on humans today.
Back in 2016, we were the first company to
start testing self-driving trucks on public roads
that has given us the ability to understand
the trucking industry very intimately.
This is Marvin, my first foray into the
self-driving vehicle industry.
My cofounder Alex and I built this self-driving golf cart
over the course of six weeks at the University of Waterloo.
And initially we wanted to deploy that as a shuttle service
for college campuses and universities.
We quickly learned that that wasn't the ideal business case
for this technology,
but the fundamental ideals around self-driving,
it's really important to simplify the problem
and focus on a niche application
because it's such a hard problem to solve.
(Houts) We're working to develop this new model that we call
a transfer-hub model,
where goods move autonomously between logistics facilities
that are adjacent to highways
and they would move autonomously on that segment,
but in order to get the goods to the first and last mile
of that journey, there would still be human drivers
operating on a short haul basis.
And because the whole enterprise would become more efficient
than it had been before,
there will be more of those new jobs created
for local route, for existing drivers to transition
into that new type of work.
(Ben Stinnett) So Embark first and foremost is a software company.
But to empower that software to be as functional as it is,
you need the underlying hardware.
And that's sort of what we do here in the prototyping lab,
where we're sitting.
We've got a team of hardware engineers,
mechanical engineers,
down to engineering technicians and machinists
that are able to work rapidly and
iterate and prototype quickly
to enable the software development to happen
at just an incredibly fast pace.
So we're here in front of one of our Embark-powered trucks
equipped with our multimodal sensor suite.
So here towards the back of the cab,
we've got our rear-facing radar.
This sensor allows the truck to see behind it and
detect objects and how fast they're coming up towards us.
Up here towards the middle of the cab
is our side-facing LIDAR.
The sensor gives us a full 180-degree perspective
of everything that's happening
on the left- and right-hand side of the vehicle.
And up above the cab is our main sensor bar.
This has cameras, long-range LIDAR, and a GPS system
that combined allows the truck to make
the most accurate and safest decisions possible
while it's navigating the roads.
(Houts) So today we're out here on our demo route in Oakland.
We go on a loop it's about 60 miles
and drive around various highways
with some challenging terrain, challenging situations, and,
of course, we've got challenging Bay Area traffic.
So we have all of these different sensors and
that lets us sense the world more completely
than a human driver can.
So a human driver only has two eyes
and they can only be looking in one direction at a time,
while the truck can be observing the whole world
in full 360 around it at all times.
And one of the things Embark uses
that's different than other companies
is what we call vision map fusion.
So we're using both the prior information in the map
as well as the live sensor information from the cameras.
As we're coming up to the clover leaf,
it's a very tight corner that you only find on interchanges
and not straight sections of road.
And now we have to slow down as we approach this corner
because it's a very tight corner to be making
and going uphill at the same time,
which just adds a little extra complexity
for all the various algorithms.
All right, we're coming up to the tunnel here.
And this is a section that's
particularly challenging for sensors.
We've got radar and LIDAR that are getting
all sorts of interesting returns off of things.
You've got those fans in the ceiling,
those show up very interestingly on the radar.
As we come out of the tunnel here,
you can see that's very bright and very dark same time.
And so you need a high dynamic range camera
in order to pick up objects in the world.
(Warren) Something that it's really important for us to focus on
as we're working to bring this new technology to market
is to educate the public about what it will be like
to drive next to an autonomous truck.
They might not know that actually this truck is safer,
it's more efficient, and it's more environmentally friendly
than the trucks that they're used to driving next to
every day.
(Stinnett) It's gonna revolutionize the way we think about
hauling goods, the speed at which we get them,
and reduce the number of accidents on the highway,
which is top of mind for all of us.
(Moak) There's some real problems to be solved here.
And once you start to look at the hard facts
of the driver shortage and
the number of fatalities that we see on US highways,
there aren't very many other problems
that I'd rather be working on.
(upbeat music)