Into the future with ANITA
In Ulm, MAN and its partners have developed and trialled the use of self-driving trucks in a container terminal. The technology works.
Redundant technology
The truck itself is a standard MAN TGX 18.510 semi-trailer, but it looks somewhat strange with its two Hesai LiDAR systems, which sit at the height of the lower edge of the windscreen and are responsible for detecting objects. They share the work with four other LiDAR systems, six radars and nine cameras. The entire system is redundant so that if one system fails, another can take over.
The self-driving MAN truck is the star of the Autonomous Innovation in Terminal Operations project, known as ANITA. The research and practical project offers a glimpse into the eco-friendly fusion of road and rail freight transport of the future. Following the three-year project and the final six-month practical test in the ongoing operation of the container handling terminal, MAN’s Chief Development Officer Dr Frederik Zohm is pleased: “We have achieved our project goals.” And Ernst Stöckl-Pukall, head of Digitalisation Industry 4.0 at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action adds: “The beginning of the project was challenging due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but now everyone is thrilled with the result.”
Real-life test
Implementing the ambitious project was no small feat. The team consisting of MAN Truck & Bus SE (self-driving trucks), Deutsche Bahn AG (logistics, container management, test environment), Fresenius University of Applied Sciences (system analysis, networking) and Götting KG (technology consulting for object location and environment detection) broke new ground with the complete integration of a self-driving truck into all processes of an ongoing container handling operation.
The project goals were ambitious: The truck, christened Newton, was to drive smoothly and autonomously in the real environment of the container handling facilities at Dornstadt near Ulm, which handles 300 to 400 transshipments per day, and relieve the driver of all tasks from order acceptance to communicating with dispatchers and forklift drivers to loading and locking the container fully automatically – while always keeping an eye on its surroundings in real time, paying attention to unforeseen events or pedestrians and reliably detecting obstacles. What made it all the more remarkable was that the test drives took place during ongoing container handling operations, so the truck had to adapt to and not interfere with the complex processes already taking place on the site from the very beginning.
Complex communication
In order for ANITA to deliver transferable and scalable results for self-driving trucks to be integrated into logistics hubs’ processes in the future and to enable transportation by driverless truck between logistics hubs, there were other hurdles far beyond driverless driving to overcome. In addition to safe obstacle detection with LiDAR, radars and nine cameras, all communication also had to be digitalised.
For ANITA, analogue processes that would otherwise be handled by the driver were all analysed and converted into a digital set of rules, which formed the basis for the digital communication interfaces. It was not without its pitfalls: “We have a communication-intensive multi-agent system here with different parties, including truck drivers, crane and forklift operators, who use different forms of communication such as speech or gestures,” explained Prof Dr Christian T. Haas from Fresenius University of Applied Sciences, who was responsible for the complex system analysis. “To automate this, we had to marry different systems together so that machines and databases could talk to each other.” The end result was fully digitalised mission planning.
To automate this, we had to marry different systems together so that machines and databases could talk to each other. “
And where do we go from here? The project partners agree that scaling up is the next big task. With ANITA, a new, promising basic standard has been developed, and the technical description and practical experience are available. “We have created added value with ANITA by putting many small building blocks together. This is a big step for the future use of self-driving trucks,” Dr Zohm sums up. Many issues still need to be solved for this to happen – but what the future may look like could already be glimpsed at the container terminal in Dornstadt near Ulm at the end of September.
Text: Ralf Kund
Photos: MAN
