PSA International, which operates the port, currently has more than two dozen trucks in operation, operating around the clock without human drivers. The trucks are equipped with software developed by Boston-based startup Venti Technologies.
The automated trucks represent only a small part of PSA’s 1,000-vehicle fleet. But the fact that the vehicles can continuously perform their tasks independently and reliably without human intervention is a big moment for autonomous driving technology, said Heidi Wyle, CEO and founder of Venti.
“It is an important milestone in making the promise of autonomy a reality,” Wyle said.
The same cannot be said for robotaxis. Companies backed by Google and General Motors have burned through billions of dollars and have little hope of profits any time soon. Last fall, California regulators revoked Cruise’s self-driving car license due to several accidents, including an incident in which a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian and hurled her in front of a Cruise car.
So why do autonomous vehicles seem to be developing faster than robo-taxis in Singapore’s port? For one thing, deploying self-driving cars in dense urban centers has been difficult from the start because of the many variables—weather, road layout, traffic patterns, pedestrians—that a robo-taxis must take into account.
But transport hubs such as ports, warehouses and airports are mostly enclosed spaces where companies like Venti can more easily solve technical problems.
“The complexity of an enclosed courtyard like the one we operate is probably at least 10,000 times simpler in terms of the computational problem than that of an inner-city environment,” Wyle said.
In addition, logistics arguably offers a more promising entry market for autonomous vehicles, especially considering the shortage of truck drivers in major countries such as the US and Japan and the extent to which global supply chains have collapsed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We need to be smarter,” Kim Pong Ong, CEO of PSA International, told the Globe. “The labor pool has become tighter and more expensive over the years. It has become increasingly difficult to find drivers with manual transmissions.”
That’s why Safar Partners, a Cambridge-based venture capital firm, decided to back Venti rather than a robo-taxi startup.
“Venti was a wonderful first step to enter autonomous driving,” said Arunas Chesonis, managing partner of Safar.
While the logistics may be less demanding than robo-taxis, working with such a large port in Singapore was a complex undertaking, according to Chesonis.
“They didn’t take the easiest first customer with PSA,” he said. “They grabbed the tiger by the tail in a large, demanding organization. And that they were actually (successful) is even more impressive.”
Thomas Lee can be reached at [email protected].
