Autonomous trucking is a promising technology that can greatly impact modern logistics and the environment. Ensuring its safety on public roads is one of the main duties that requires an accurate perception of the environment. To achieve this, machine learning methods rely on large datasets, but to this day, no such datasets are available for autonomous trucks.

Autonomous trucking is a promising technology that can greatly impact modern logistics and the environment. Ensuring its safety on public roads is one of the main duties that requires an accurate perception of the environment. To achieve this, machine learning methods rely on large datasets, but to this day, no such datasets are available for autonomous trucks. MAN TruckScenes allows the research community to come into contact with truck-specific challenges, such as trailer occlusions, novel sensor perspectives, and terminal environments for the first time. It comprises more than 740 scenes of 20 s each within a multitude of different environmental conditions.

"There is AI for an individual truck, which could involve anything from vision systems and autonomous driving, to predictive maintenance. And then there is AI related to fleet operations, which could involve everything from route optimization to an electric vehicle suitability assessment," stated Mike Branch, vice-president, data and analytics at Geotab, headquartered in Oakville, Ont. Geotab provides telematics services for commercial fleet management via a software-as-a-service model. In 2015, the company had one data scientist; today it has 80 of them.