* Pennsylvania - Coopersburg company pioneering driverless truck
-- When a road crew paints a double yellow line down the center of a major highway it's often protected by a vehicle with an apparatus called a "truck-mounted attenuator" that follows close behind, flashing a blinking arrow... It's a fancy highway construction term that means mobile shock absorber, designed to protect road crews by taking the impact of a speeding vehicle the way an offensive lineman protects a quarterback from a blitzing linebacker... Royal Truck & Equipment of Coopersburg, which has quietly become the nation's leading producer of the highly specialized trucks, wants to eliminate that problem by using the same technology that guides military drones. It has demonstrated a driverless truck prototype, the first of its kind in the U.S.A., to state officials in Florida, one of the few states that allows such vehicles to be tested on the road... Federal data show 105 workers were killed in construction-zone incidents in 2013, the most recent year on record. About two-thirds of those deaths involved a vehicle. Including vehicle drivers and passengers, 579 people died in work-zone collisions in 2013, including 16 in Pennsylvania... Driverless trucks are already in growing use in the mining industry, traversing familiar, repetitive routes collecting ore from mines. The Calgary Herald reported this month that SunCor, one of the companies mining the oil sands in Alberta, Canada, is weighing plans to use all driverless trucks within the next decade, possibly eliminating 800 high-paying jobs... Pennsylvania requires truck-mounted attenuators on construction projects on any major highway. They're optional for jobs on conventional roadways. But for now though, someone must be driving the truck...
(Photo from Royal Truck & Equipment: TRAFFIC CONTROL TRUCKS / TMA -Truck Mounted Attenuator Trucks- with NEW SCORPION) -- Coopersburg, , USA - The Morning Call, by Scott Kraus - 14 June 2015Labels: driverless trucks
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home