C.H. Robinson and Waymo Via provide an update on autonomous driving technology partnership

Less than eight months after Minneapolis, Minn.-based global logistics services provider and freight forwarder C.H. Robinson and Mountain View, Calif.-based Waymo Via, the trucking and local delivery unit of autonomous driving technology company Waymo, announced a long-term strategic partnership focused on mutually exploring the practical application of autonomous driving technology in both logistics and supply chains, the companies recently heralded examples of their partnership in action on a 222-mile Texas-based “beer run” lane, from Dallas to Houston, moving Corona and Modelo beer for Constellation Brands, an international producer and marketer of beer, wine, and spirits with operations in the U.S., Mexico, New Zealand, and Italy.

At the heart of the partnership between C.H. Robinson and Waymo is the meshing of Waymo Driver, Waymo’s autonomous technology, with Navisphere, C.H. Robinson’s Navisphere, its connected logistics platform, which provides end-to-end visibility, consistent business processes, and strategy-driven business intelligence on a global basis.

As previously reported by LM, when this partnership was initially announced, the companies said that they would focus on running multiple pilots in the Dallas-Houston transportation lane, using Waymo’s autonomous trucks moving C.H. Robinson’s shipper customers’ freight. And they added that both during and after the pilots, they will work together “to shape the future development and expansion of autonomous driving technology as an additional transportation solution,” noting that it will provide various benefits, including: much-needed capacity, help to improve the carrier and driver experience; and address the business challenges posed by long-term driver shortages.

To date, the partnership has been a success, as it has helped  Constellation deliver more than 1,000,000 pounds of freight—or the beer equivalent—coupled with a 100% on-time delivery rate, and zero damage to any loads.

C.H. Robinson Chief Commercial Officer Chris O’Brien explained in an interview that, in many ways, this initial deployment of the Dallas-to-Houston lane highlights the myriad steps taken by the partner companies, in showing what they were trying to prove.

“Logistics is this really choreographed dance with our people, the processes, the tech, the shipper, and the loading dock,” he said. “So, the multiple pilots with Waymo are more really focused on that practical application of the technology. And we're developing and testing all the operational details that are required for full autonomy in this. That includes everything from the data needed to plan that the shipment to how the trailers needed to be loaded.”

A key component of that, he said, has to do with how the freight is arranged in a trailer so that everything is properly balanced as it is in transit. And that is a process that is contingent on various factors, including how many pallets are in the truck and their weight and dimensions, as not all pallets are uniform inside the trailer and also various stacking heights.

And while this endeavor is focused on autonomous driving technology, O’Brien said that a human element remains fully intact—and needed—for this process to be successful.

“They [humans] get to see and sign off on a truck before those doors close, and they know how it [freight] has been distributed and adjust things on the fly for braking,” he said.

For autonomous trucking, O’Brien said that all freight-related data needs to be determined and fed into Waymo’s machine learning tool so that the technology can make any needed adjustments, which he said worked well, and is followed by the loading component.

“So, at the shipper location, we have to make sure that the product availability is there,” he said. “We get the orders in electronically into Navisphere, C.H. Robinson’s technology platform. We want to make sure that that trailer is full that it's ready to go, because we're planning the timing of this and the hand off to Waymo. So, if the truck sits and the product is not full that is a miss. We don’t want that. We are scheduling the appointments, we're scheduling the multiple docks that they have, and making sure that the freight for the autonomous vehicle is in the right place.”

The next step was developing a drop yard, with the key objective being to get freight from a minimum distance from the I-45 Expressway.

O’Brien said the companies intentionally chose a drop yard that was 1.7 miles off of I-45, which minimized the time a Waymo truck has to be in travel mode and get to the interstate while maximizing the time that it travels autonomously.

And, in testing all of the operations required in a freight handoff, he said the companies elected to create a separate handoff point, with a separate location.

“We could have done the pickup directly at the shipper and then engage in autonomy,” he said. “But we are trying to test and learn a model that exists as this gets scale, and as Waymo continues to scale up, there will be these large hubs, where freight is interchanged between the autonomous long haul and the local drivers. So, instead of doing that at the shipper, we wanted to create and test that real environment so we chose a drop yard.”

Carrier selection was the next step in the process, with O’Brien observing that with C.H. Robinson being a company that works with 85,000 carrier partners that could take the freight to a transfer point, it is very focused on the role of a small- and medium-sized carrier in autonomy, adding that, generally, it's mostly the larger carriers who have been seen as the potential purchasers of this equipment.

“But the small and medium carriers make up the majority of trucking firms in the U.S. and the majority of our marketplace, too,” he said. “We intentionally chose a medium-sized carrier that we've been working with for a long time to pick up the freight and take it to the drop lot that we arranged in Dallas and handle that transfer. The transfer is kind of the next step, so Waymo has to pick up the freight at the same time every day and deliver it every day to the distributor in Houston and that area that that serves the restaurants and stores and distribution companies of that region. So, the transfer point for the Waymo truck needed to be seamless.

While the initial Dallas-to-Houston lane proved to be successful, Waymo’s Head of Commercialization for Trucking Charlie Jatt said that, a measured approach will be taken in expanding the technology to other routes and customers.

“The autonomous system kind of proved to be very capable between Dallas and Houston, and we're already operating through this pilot in autonomous mode 99% of the time on the highway,” said Jatt. “There is still reliability and validation that we, of course, need to finalize within the system but that combined with the operational success, it really does lay down the foundation for expanding it to other lanes and especially longer lanes…and the short answer is absolutely yes, that capability is there.”

But he noted that is an approach that will be more gradual over the next couple of years with Waymo’s partners like C.H. Robinson and also identifying where there is what Jatt called the sweet spot for where there is the most kind of demand, interest, and value for the autonomy benefits on different types of lanes.

“Route length is absolutely something that we excel at and then as we expand up operating in more jurisdictions, more geographic and weather conditions, then that map of capability will expand,” he said. “We're in a multi-year strategic partnership to develop and launch this technology commercially and in a scalable fashion, which this pilot really was. Step one was in testing and proving out the operational model. And the exciting thing is that because both the operations and autonomy were successful, it lays the groundwork for us to expand these types of pilot operations looking to later this year and next year, with the vision really being that we can build kind of an operational pipeline and proof point such that when the technology is fully ready, which will be soon in the coming years, that we’ve got all those other pieces in place and figured out and ready to launch simultaneously.”

When asked about lane selection processes, Jatt said that Waymo is very thoughtful about lane selection and determining where there is a strong overlap between the near-term autonomy capability and where there is going to be the most value for its partners like C.H. Robinson and their customers like Constellation Brands.

“Dallas to Houston is where we've identified our first intended autonomous lane to launch, and some of the factors that went into that decision are that they are huge freight demand centers and there is a ton of freight moving in both directions between Dallas and Houston,” he said. “It is a nice attractable initial lane because it's a long enough distance to kind of prove out the operations and prove out the capability of the system. But it's also a short enough distance to be really appropriate for our first place to launch, and having support nearby.”

Dense traffic areas are not something that was have factored into the lane selection, he said, because anywhere where there's going to be a lot of freight movement, it's going to be near population centers.

“It does present kind of unique challenges and scenarios for the autonomous system,” he said. “So that's obviously a big focus area for developing and maturing our software technology. The good news for Waymo is that we're not only developing fully autonomous technology for trucks, but also for passenger cars, and dense traffic on a highway starts to look more like driving around on surface streets in a city, which is something that we do all the time with our passenger cars. We're operating very reliably in those dense traffic settings, but it is a unique set of challenges which isn't to say that kind of the low traffic, high speed right out in the middle between Dallas and Houston on the more rural stretch of the freeway certainly has its own set of challenges as well so we really have to just look at it from all angles, and stress test the system in All of those conditions get the real world of experience through pilots like this one, and then ultimately prove and validate the  safety and performance for our technology, which we're well, on the path to doing.”

From C.H. Robinson’s perspective, O’Brien said that it has Waymo lead with the lane, adding that the uniqueness of this relationship is C.H. Robinson is largest truckload shipper in the world.

“When they picked a lane, they picked a good one,” he said. “It's dense from a freight standpoint. There’s large industrial centers and large consumer centers. So, as you know a really strong lane for us, and because we have more than any, it's not one shipper or one trucking company we represent. The hundreds of thousands of different companies that we work with it made it relatively easy to go find a great customer that was interested in autonomy and being a part of working with us to advance this on half of both Waymo and C. H. Robinson, and we have thousands of shipments in the lane. So, it was basically a situation where Waymo could get what it needed from one place, and then we could select one customer. But the interest level is really high and in choosing a nice dense lane like that, it know, helps prove out again for the shipper that they get to see the value of the potential efficiencies and synergies that happen. that was the uniqueness for us is, we have a lot of density in, really, every dense lane.”