Autonomous Trucking: Driverless Rigs and ABB Robots

Autonomous trucking has moved from test tracks to paying freight. Aurora's driverless semis have hauled loads on Texas interstates with nobody in the cab since spring 2025, and in the past month Volvo and Waabi, Kodiak and Einride have each added a lane or a customer. This post follows the job from long-haul drivers counting their legal hours, through the platooning and highway pilot trials of the 2010s, to the hub-to-hub runs of 2026. ABB builds neither trucks nor driving software, so the post also looks at the work that waits at freight terminals, from charging to unloading and moving pallets, and at where ABB robots could fit there.

A Kodiak Robotics self-driving truck pulling a trailer marked Self-driving truck, 2023. Photo: Votpuske / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From logbooks to platoons and highway pilots

For most of the last century a long-haul load moved only as far as one driver could legally take it. The Interstate Commerce Commission enforced the first hours-of-service rules in 1938. Today a US driver hauling property may drive at most 11 hours inside a 14-hour on-duty window and must then take 10 hours off. Drivers tracked those hours in paper logs until electronic logging devices became mandatory, with a compliance date of 18 December 2017. Those limits are a large part of the pitch for driverless trucks. CNBC notes that a driverless truck could roll for up to 20 hours a day, while a driver has to stop and rest.

A Mack tractor-trailer in A&P refrigerated service in 1940, two years after the first US hours-of-service rules. Photo: unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first step toward automation kept the drivers in their seats and linked the trucks electronically, so a platoon could brake and accelerate together at short gaps and cut air resistance. In 2013 the US Federal Highway Administration funded two truck platooning projects, one led by Auburn University with Peloton Technology and Peterbilt, the other by Caltrans with UC Berkeley and Volvo Trucks. In 2016 the Netherlands ran the European Truck Platooning Challenge, in which DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo trucks drove from several European cities to the Netherlands. Truck makers were also trying trucks that steer themselves. In July 2014 Daimler showed its Future Truck 2025 prototype driving itself on a closed stretch of the A14 autobahn near Magdeburg.

Daimler's Future Truck 2025 prototype on a closed stretch of the A14 near Magdeburg, July 2014, while the screen shows the driver with his arms raised. Photo: Michael KR / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From May 2015 Daimler tested self-driving trucks on public roads in Nevada. In 2016 Otto, a start-up Uber bought that year, carried beer for Anheuser-Busch more than 120 miles with a human on board who was not driving. Starsky Robotics drove 7 miles in Florida with the cab empty in February 2018, and TuSimple made an 80-mile driverless run between Tucson and Phoenix in December 2021. That same year Japan ran a platoon on the Shin-Tomei Expressway in which nobody sat in the driver's seat of the following trucks. Kodiak began commercial driverless operations in December 2024, though only on private lease roads in West Texas.

A self-driving truck from Otto, the start-up Uber bought in August 2016, photographed in July 2016. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Driverless freight lanes in Texas and Ohio in 2026

Aurora Innovation, founded in 2017 by Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell, launched driverless trucking on the Dallas to Houston corridor in late April 2025 and added Fort Worth to El Paso later that year. When CNBC rode along in September 2026, Aurora had 20 driverless trucks working I-45 and I-20. "It's using lasers, radar, and cameras to look all around it," Urmson said. At its investor day in late September the company reported more than 500,000 driverless miles and said it expects 200 driverless trucks by the end of 2026 and more than 30,000 by 2030. Hirschbach Motor Lines has ordered 500 trucks, with deliveries starting in 2027.

A sensor pod with a camera above the windshield of a Kodiak Robotics self-driving truck, 2023. Photo: Votpuske / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Other companies signed up customers in early October. On 5 October Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Waabi began customer runs for Warp, a less-than-truckload carrier, on the Dallas to Houston lane. They use the Volvo VNL Autonomous, which has redundancy in six safety-critical systems, and an observer still rides in the driver's seat. Kodiak named IKEA as launch partner for driverless runs from Houston to a distribution point near Frisco, Texas, a lane Kodiak has served daily with a safety driver for four years. In Marysville, Ohio, two cab-less electric Einride trucks now shuttle freight between EASE Logistics sites, and a remote operator watches each one.

An Einride cab-less electric truck on show at a trade fair in March 2022. Photo: Phil Whitehouse / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

These lanes link fixed points such as terminals, warehouses and distribution centres, and Volvo's Autona freight offer bundles the truck with terminals, operations and uptime support. At each end, loads still have to be broken down and built up again, and that is where ABB robots could fit. ABB's Robotic Depalletizer pairs a robot with ABB's own vision system and software to unpick mixed boxes from pallets up to 2.8 metres high, at up to 750 cycles an hour, and feed them to sorting systems. An IRB 660, a four-axis palletizer with a 3.15 metre reach and a 250 kg payload, can build the outgoing pallets. Cells like these are planned in RobotStudio first, and our truck unloading post covers the trailer itself.

An ABB IRB 660 robot stacking bags of Lucchetti pasta on a pallet at Molinos in Argentina. Photo: Eduardo Gil / ABB

What driverless freight still needs from robots and people

Electric driverless trucks still have to be plugged in, and nobody rides along to do it. ABB has built a robot for that job in mines. Its eMine Robot Automated Connection Device, shown at MINExpo 2024 in Las Vegas, is a robot arm that connects the charger to an electric mining truck with no person involved. ABB said it would test the arm in its Swedish laboratory and then at Boliden's Aitik mine, with Boliden, BHP and Komatsu as partners. No such arm has been announced for highway trucks, so a version for freight terminals is still only a possibility. A cab-less Einride truck has no driver to step out at a stop, so every routine task there needs a machine or a worker on site.

ABB's eMine Robot Automated Connection Device, a robot arm built to plug chargers into electric mining trucks, at MINExpo 2024 in Las Vegas. Photo: ABB

Inside the terminal, the same kind of autonomy already runs on a smaller scale. ABB's Flexley Mover P604 is an autonomous mobile robot that lifts and carries loads using 3D visual SLAM. It builds its own map of a building, positions itself to within 10 mm and shares the map with the rest of its fleet, without extra infrastructure. A fleet like that could shuttle pallets between dock doors and storage while driverless trucks wait at the gate, but no hub has reported that pairing yet. Households will barely notice the change, even though IKEA freight bound for a Texas distribution point may soon cover the highway stretch with no one at the wheel.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, an autonomous mobile robot that finds its way with 3D visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

The open problems start with money. Aurora lost more than $800 million in 2025 and is aiming for positive free cash flow in 2028, while Bank of America puts Aurora's service at about $0.85 a mile against roughly $1.30 for driver wages and benefits. Safety rules were written for a person in the cab. In October FMCSA let driverless trucks use cab-mounted warning beacons instead of the triangles a driver sets out, and the drivers' group OOIDA called beacons "not an adequate replacement." A CVSA standard also requires an enhanced inspection every four days, with zero defects allowed. Drivers' jobs are the other worry, and as uShip's Sean Wu told CNBC, "The drivers do more than just move the rig."

A self-driving Embark Trucks Peterbilt with a roof rack of cameras and sensors, on display in August 2018. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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