While the world is still coming to terms with self-driving cars, Otto which is a Uber-owned self-driving vehicle operation on October 20, successfully delivered 50,000 cans of chilled Budweiser beer with the help of a self-driving truck.
One of the first commercial delivery by a self-driving truck was a 120-mile trip on Interstate 25 from Fort Collins, Colo., to Colorado Springs.
Uber has predicted a future in which you can ride in a self-driving car but this was taking things to another level. It's in a way controversial too as the human element is removed and we are moving towards an automated transportation ecosystem.
Uber acquired Otto, a San Francisco start-up which is run by a number of veterans of Google’s long-running autonomous vehicle research in August this year for nearly $700 million.
The Otto blog said that, in partnership with Anheuser-Busch, and with full support from the State of Colorado, they hauled 51,744 cans of Budweiser from Fort Collins, through downtown Denver, to Colorado Springs. By using cameras, radar, and lidar sensors mounted on the vehicle to “see" the road, Otto’s system controlled the acceleration, braking, and steering of the truck to carry the beer exit-to-exit without any human intervention.
In fact, their professional driver was out of the driver’s seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back.
This delivery was also indicative of Uber’s ambitions to become an enormous automated transportation network.
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