- PepsiCo is now using autonomous trucks to deliver soda and snacks in the United States.
- The American food and beverage company is using Gatik’s driverless box trucks to ferry products from site to site.
- The Isuzu-branded autonomous delivery vehicles are on the road today in Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas.
Your next bag of Doritos may have been delivered to the local warehouse using a fully autonomous box truck. That’s because PepsiCo, the American food and beverage giant, has partnered with Gatik AI, an autonomous driving technology startup, deploying several driverless box trucks across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas.
The two companies have entered a multi-year strategic partnership to bring driverless freight into PepsiCo’s North American food and beverage supply chain, marking the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment to date, according to Gatik.
Photo by: Gatik
A total of 41 Isuzu-branded box trucks are currently making driverless deliveries in three American states, with more vehicles slated to join the fleet in the coming months. In Arizona, 35 vehicles roam unattended, with an additional five in Texas and one in Arkansas, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Gatik’s autonomous trucks are mainly used on routes that require few intermediate stops, with repeatability making driving better and safer with each pass. “Many of the routes that we’re operating are very repeatable and so, as the truck gets more history going through, it can become more sophisticated, and it learns as it goes,” said Jim Farrell, PepsiCo’s senior vice president of supply chain, for WSJ.
Some trucks deliver goods from manufacturing facilities to local warehouses, while others go from warehouses to stores. In the latter case, PepsiCo employees are there to meet the trucks and unload them.
The Isuzu trucks, which are powered by combustion engines, have multiple cameras on the front and back, as well as radar and lidar sensors. Inside, the conventional truck cab retains the steering wheel and air conditioning, but Gatik fitted three big screens that show footage from the external cameras and the computer-vision system.
The main promises of autonomous delivery trucks are their near-perfect on-time scores and the fact that they don’t call in sick. According to Gatik, the driverless trucks in PepsiCo’s fleet have had an on-time delivery score of over 98%. This is particularly beneficial for companies like PepsiCo, especially during busy seasons when qualified drivers may not be readily available when needed.
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Source: Gatik