Students build self-driving truck to save lives

A driverless truck developed at CSUS will make life easier for some CalTrans employees while working on the highways.

The truck, called a “shadow truck,” will follow workers on highways as a measure of protection against accidents.

Currently, large trucks drive slowly or stand behind the highway workers while they work on the roads and highways. The only difference is that it will not require a driver, so if there’s an accident, there will be nobody behind the wheel to be injured.

CSUS graduate Vincent Herman worked on the truck as a senior in electrical engineering as a project suggested by Professor Mahlon Heller. He has been involved with it ever since.

Herman says this truck is aimed at saving the lives of the workers, more specifically the drivers of the trucks that trail the roadworkers. It is the driver’s job to take impacts “and it happens more often than you think.”

“The workers are being protected by this truck,” Herman said. “But the driver of the truck is still in danger. If the truck gets hit by a car, the driver won’t be injured, but what if it’s a big truck that hits it?”

The vehicle, which is parked in front of Riverside Building, looks like a regular flat bed truck with a funky sound system on top of the cabin and a bar with lights. The parts that look like old-style speakers are signal receivers that get the orders from the front truck and send them to the computer, which will then issue commands to the remote truck.

“The signal comes from the lead truck and is received by the receivers in the shadow truck,” Herman, an electrical engineer, said. “Each receiver has a different angle to pick up the signal wherever it’s coming from.”

After receiving the signals from the lead truck, the truck will go where it’s told as if it were remote controlled, but it will do whatever the lead truck does.

Herman doesn’t know exactly what the cost of construction of this truck is, but he knows it is “a lot of money.” CalTrans is funding the project, which Herman projects will be completed in less then a year. He and his team have been working on the project for about 18 months.

Herman said it didn’t take much to get the funding because former drivers of the protection trucks who were involved in accidents while driving were present.

The truck’s first test drive will be before this year ends at McClellan Air Force base.

Herman said this project is taking a lot of dedication because most of the components for the equipment that will be on the two trucks, lead and shadow truck, have to be produced from scratch. “When I was asked to work on the project, I thought about it for about four months,” Herman, currently a graduate student at UC Davis, said. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to dedicate the time because it would require a minimum two year commitment. But as I saw the project I decided to take it.”

So along with a group of eight students, some professors and a visiting scholar from South Korea, they are nearing completion. If the project works, the next phase will be to implement it on real CalTrans vehicles. It will take approximately two years of testing it after it is completed before that phase will be implemented.

“This truck is designed to save lives”, the 39-year-old Herman said. “Even if it saves only one life, we’ve accomplished our goal.”