Objective

Off-tracking refers to the phenomenon that the rear wheels of a truck do not follow the same track as the front wheels and wander off the travel lane. This phenomenon has been a major source of problems associated with trucking, particularly safety hazards to the surrounding vehicles and damage to the infrastructure. We believe that this off-tracking problem can be eliminated or alleviated significantly through automatic trailer steering, in the form of either automated trailer track-following or lane-following. With such an automation technology in place, new and more productive modes of truck operations may be feasible. For example, a truck can safely haul a larger number of shorter trailers, and this mode of operation may have high productivity potential for the Less-Than-Truck-Load (LTL) freight industry, particularly those segments of the LTL industry in which loading, packing, load balancing, picking and unloading account for a significant amount of the total time of truck operation. Moreover, smaller trailers can be dropped off for loading and unloading by the customer before and after transportation. All these will allow trucks to do what they are meant to do: traveling, not waiting. They may also significantly reduce pavement wear. Moreover, such a technology may also have applications on articulated buses and many other types of large vehicles.

Many states of Western U.S. allow Longer-Combination Vehicles (LCVs) to operate on designated highways and nearby roads needed for access to service stations and freight transportation hubs. California does not allow such operations, and major reasons include the safety hazards and threat to the infrastructure associated with the off-tracking problem. This new technology may help realize safe LCV operations in California and will certainly help improve the safety of existing LCV operations. This technology has the potential for facilitating the deployment of a physically separated truck lane dedicated to only trucks and LCVs.

Methodology

These safety, damage-reduction and productivity potentials must be assessed and evaluated from many different perspectives, e.g., technological feasibility, increased safety, reduced infrastructure cost, increased vehicle cost, increased trucking efficiency, etc., and in the larger context of the transportation and logistics systems. This proposed research seeks to (a) develop operating concepts featuring automated track-following or lane-following through automatic trailer steering for the purpose of improving the safety, infrastructure impact and productivity of trucking and (b) assess these concepts at the systems level, including technological feasibility and potential benefits and costs to the trucking industry and the infrastructure provider.

The proposed research complements the completed and on-going research at PATH and other California transportation research programs in at least three ways. First, it expands the research attention to a promising new but very related direction. Second, it can reuse much of the expertise accumulated by California researchers since the creation of the PATH Program. Third, it examines partial automation as a near-term potential means of improving current transportation operations, as opposed to focusing on the very long-term possibility of full automation.

Expected research outcomes include an assessment of the feasibility of the automated trailer steering technology, an assessment of the safety and infrastructure-impact benefits, an estimate for the cost of automated trailer steering, a quantitative evaluation of the expected gain in logistics efficiency, and a recommendation regarding the possible implementation of the technology, including future directions related to the research, development and deployment of this technology and related system issues. All these outcomes will be developed with a goal of near-term implementation of the technology.