Look Ma, No Hands!

This truck has no driver. What’s more, it’s a safety vehicle.

One of the most dangerous workplaces in the construction industry is on an active roadway. As reported in Constructor magazine's July/August issue, high-speed vehicles crashing into work zones is a huge concern to the highway construction industry and state DOTs nationwide.

One widely used safety measure is the truck-mounted attenuator (TMA), a sacrificial impact-absorbing device mounted on the rear of a truck that can be parked at the beginning of a roadway jobsite. In the case of a moving work zone, such as a line-painting operation, the TMA truck follows at the end of the work party, constantly protecting the rear of the team.

Of course, the worker who is most exposed to danger is the driver of the TMA truck. "Driving a truck that’s designed to

be crashed into — is that something you really want to do?" asks Andrew Roberts, strategic accounts manager, Royal Truck

and Equipment, a Contractors Association of Eastern PA member and a leading maker of TMAs and TMA trucks. "Quite often, the attenuator truck will get pushed off the road and over the embankment, and the driver is going with it."

Royal has come up with a solution for that problem: get rid of the driver. They have partnered with Microsystems, a subsidiary of Krato Defense, to create a self-driving truck that follows behind a mobile construction team. The Autonomous TMA (ATMA) truck is not a remote-controlled vehicle with an outboard operator. It is a form of robot. The ATMA decides for itself how to steer, speed up and slow down in order to follow accurately behind the moving job. It even knows enough to apply its own brakes if it’s crashed into, to protect the crew.

"Putting on an autonomous truck like this is of interest to DOTs," explains Roberts. "It’s not about saving the labor.

The reaction I’ve seen is, ‘We get to get a guy out of that truck? Yeah!’ They’re removing their liability. There’s been very little negative feedback. You’d think unions would object, but nobody really wants that job. You have a 2 percent chance of not going home that night."

Nonetheless, moving from a controlled, private test area to a public roadway involves issues of public safety, and state

DOTs are moving cautiously. 

Richard Biter, assistant secretary for intermodal system development, Florida Department of Transportation, is definitely

interested in this type of technology, and the larger possibilities of automated and self-driving vehicles. "We want to advance that technology," he says. "We’d love to see that happen." But he is cautious about making sure it is sufficiently matured. He is looking to the state universities to run appropriate testing to ensure that the system is both safe and effective.

The state DOTs are the key players in the larger movement toward automated vehicles. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a Preliminary Statement of Policy Concerning Automated Vehicles in May 2013, defining different levels of automation and offering guidelines to states about how to define their own testing and regulation. 

Roberts sees his follow-behind ATMA truck as an entry-level way to study self-driving cars. Testing and utilizing a lowspeed, limited-duty vehicle may serve as a stepping stone to understanding the issues of fully autonomous vehicles moving on public roads at highway speeds, taking passengers and freight anywhere at the push of a button.