Grocery retailer Loblaw has deployed “fully driverless” vans for short haul deliveries in Toronto, Canada.
Since 2019 Loblaw has been working with Californian autonomous vehicle technology company Gatik to transport goods between its logistics centres and stores using a fleet of “multi-temperature autonomous box trucks”.
“In the transport industry, these are considered “middle-mile”, short haul deliveries, taking goods from one part of our business to another. Since then, Loblaw and Gatik have transported more than 150,000 autonomous deliveries (with a safety driver on board). Throughout this time, the goal was always to get to a fully driverless operation – a milestone we achieved this past summer,” Loblaw said in a statement.
Since August the five vans have been operating in fully autonomous mode, with a driver in the cab, but in the passenger seat. It is expected that the tests will progress to removing the driver from the cab completely in the coming months. Loblaw claims this the first deployment of a fully autonomous delivery van in Canada.
The Gatik autonomous vehicle system uses a combination of LiDar and radar sensors and is deployed on other autonomous vehicles in North America. Customers include Walmart, which has been using Gatick technology on an autonomous delivery van operating on two-mile route between a fulfilment centres and Walmart retail store in Bentonville, Arkansas. Like the Loblaw pilot in Toronto this deployment initially had a safety driver in the vehicle, but has been operating fully autonomously since November 2021.
In 2016, Ontario began a 10-year pilot programme under the Highway Traffic Act to allow testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads under strict conditions, including the presence of a safety driver. Ontario updated its programme in 2019 to permit driverless testing, subject to certain additional conditions. While these include testing to demonstrate that the technology is “safe and effective” and the ability to “monitor and control the vehicle” is required, details around how the Ministry of Transportation is satisfied that autonomous technology is safe and effective are not public information.
While all the companies involved in the Loblaw project stressed that it has never had a safety related incident there is understandably some nervousness about having autonomous vehicles operate on public roads. In 2021 the onboard “safety attendant” in an autonomous shuttle vehicle pilot in Whitby, Ontario was hospitalised with severe injuries after the vehicle left the roadway and drove straight into a tree.
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