DHL and NVIDIA will jointly run a test project with fully autonomous vehicles. The companies are going to equip the StreetScooters that DHL is developing in-house with technology from Germany's ZF, enabling the StreetScooters to drive autonomously. A first prototype of an autonomous StreetScooter has already been presented by DHL.
In total, DHL has 3,400 electric StreetScooters deployed for parcel delivery. These vehicles have also been in use in Dutch cities since early 2017. The StreetScooters are fitted with equipment from ZF, including cameras, LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging or Laser Imaging Detection And Ranging) sensors and a radar system. This equipment gathers information about the vehicle's immediate surroundings and maps obstacles such as people, vehicles, trees and walls.
Artificial intelligence
The data collected will then be fed into the ZF ProAI system. This system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the data and enable the StreetScooters to understand their surroundings. Using this information, the StreetScooters can plan a safe route around obstacles and safely complete a planned route to a parcel's final destination.
The ZF ProAI system is a system running on the NVIDIA DRIVE PX, a computer system from NVIDIA developed specifically for use in automated and autonomous cars. This computer is built into DHL's StreetScooters and effectively functions as the 'brain' of the vehicles.
Deep learning
The ZF ProAI system is connected to DHL's data centre, which houses NVIDIA DGX-1 servers. These servers run an artificial neural network, a network based on the biological neural networks present in the human body, among others. By letting an artificial neural network process large amounts of data, this network can 'learn', which is also known as deep learning. So an artificial neural network is not static, but gets smarter and smarter as it is used more and more.
The StreetScooters to be fitted with autonomous driving technology have been developed in-house by DHL. The company now has 3,400 StreetScooters deployed for parcel delivery in various countries. The company has already announced plans to increase this number to 5,000 units by 2017.
10,000 to 20,000 StreetScooters per year
DHL also produces the StreetScooters for third-party manufacturers. The company announced in May that it will produce 10,000 to 20,000 StreetScooters per year at a new production site in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia. The StreetScooters are available in different variants. For example, the company supplies the Work and Work L electric vans, as well as an e-bike under the name Work S and and the e-trike Work M. All StreetScooters are fully electric and therefore do not contain a combustion engine.
More information about the StreetScooter can be found in this article, previously published on Maakindustrie.nl.
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
Source: DHL
Source: NVIDIA
Source: ZF
Source photo: ZF
