US Postal Service will use autonomous big rigs to ship mail in new test

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has chosen self-driving trucking company TuSimple to haul mail as part of a two-week test of the startup’s autonomous technology. TuSimple will carry the mail on five round trips between the USPS’s Phoenix, Arizona, and Dallas, Texas, distribution centers, which is a stretch of more than 1,000 miles.

The test runs will include overnight driving, and TuSimple’s trucks will have both a safety driver and engineer on board. The USPS has also been running a years-long competition to create an all-electric version of its next-generation mail delivery truck.

TuSimple has been slowly expanding its testing over the last year, starting largely in the autonomous testbed that is Arizona, where it had 11 trucks…

Continue reading…

from The Verge – All Posts http://bit.ly/2M06gt0
via IFTTT