The NYT has an article on autonomous long haul trucks today - which we’ve discussed (on Fool 1.0) as a possible easier first step for autonomy, for many of the reasons discussed in the article:
However, even for trucks, they’re still years away from taking out the safety monitors. Maybe Avery Brooks is available for an update of that ad…
Interstate highway must be easiest to automate. But programming for every possible situation is probably impossible. You might expect such trucks to have many sensors and even video cameras that can contact distant controllers in an out of bounds situation. And they in turn may instruct vehicle to stop somewhere safe and wait for human assistance. Meanwhile they continue to collect more data for the programmer (or AI) to incorporate.