Recently, DeepWay, headquartered in Hefei, Anhui Province, announced that its L4 intelligent platooning heavy trucks have completed fully unmanned driving for the following vehicles along the entire 200-kilometre national highway route in Inner Mongolia. Led by a manually driven lead vehicle, the L4 autonomous heavy trucks acting as followers independently executed a wide range of manoeuvres, including truck following, lane changing, toll station passage and traffic light recognition.

The national highway route featured far more complex road conditions than enclosed expressways. It contained numerous toll stations and traffic light junctions, alongside frequent unpredictable variables such as mixed regular traffic, temporary roadwork, damaged pavement and livestock crossing the carriageway. The vehicles also contended with harsh weather conditions including sand dust and intense backlighting.

For heavy-duty trucks, enabling unmanned operation of following vehicles on such open roads tests not only the stability of perception systems but also demands decision-making algorithms capable of handling intricate scenarios.

This field trial adopted a lead-follow platooning model. The trucks maintained steady formation following and independently completed a set of operations previously recognised as bottlenecks for autonomous driving: detecting toll station barriers and slowing to pass, accurately identifying traffic light signals and responding accordingly, and identifying safe gaps to overtake slower vehicles on two-way, two-lane national highways. The whole process formed a complete closed loop spanning environmental perception, intention prediction, trajectory planning and precise vehicle control.

“This achievement further validates the reliability and safety of DeepWay’s autonomous driving technology on complex open roads. More importantly, it marks a solid step forward for DeepWay toward the ultimate vision of fully unmanned logistics robots,” a DeepWay representative stated.

“Freight autonomous driving will be one of the first large-scale commercial use cases for embodied intelligence, and the era of unmanned trunk logistics is accelerating,” said the DeepWay representative. Going forward, the company will continue to expand its L4 intelligent platooning service into more diverse and complex scenarios to advance large-scale commercial deployment.

Source: Hefei Daily