Part 1: How Artificial Intelligence is Driving the Transportation Sector Forward

What a ride it’s been for the transportation industry since the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), though it cannot surprise anybody that the industry took AI so readily into its stride. After all, haven’t we all been expecting flying cars and other futuristic vehicle innovations for some time? Everyone simply expects the transportation sector to continue to evolve, to change with the times, to digitalise.

The development of AI technology comes hand-in-hand with changes in the transport industry. No one is impressed when they see a self-driving or electric car anymore. We expect to be able to look and see in-time traffic updates, cars that can charge on a battery, courier drivers delivering parcels within minutes, and apps that can control our vehicles. This has all become the new normal.

AI has played a part in so many of these technological advancements that it can be difficult to keep up. Below are just a few of the companies we believe are using AI to make some of the most creative and innovative changes in the transportation sector.

See Part 2 HERE.

sennder

sennder was founded in 2015 by David Nothacker, Julius Köhler and Nicolaus Schefenacker and is now the leading digital European freight forwarder, offering shippers access to our connected fleet of thousands of trucks. sennder focuses on the digitalization and automation of all road logistics processes. sennder deploys over 40,000 trucks across Europe, with access to more than 120,000 vehicles, and has a team of over 1,000 people. By leveraging its proprietary technology, sennder builds an ecosystem that leads the industry into a sustainable future with a new degree of transparency, efficiency and flexibility.

sennder surpassed a valuation of USD 1 bn in 2021 and is backed by some of Europe’s leading investors including Baillie Gifford, Accel, Lakestar, HV Capital, Project A, Next47, Scania Growth Capital, Earlybird and Perpetual. Additionally, sennder joined forces with industry champions Scania and Siemens to assure innovation and state-of-the-art offerings.

sennder believes that by embracing AI-powered solutions, road freight logistics companies unlock significant benefits, including enhanced resource utilization, cost savings, and alignment with societal expectations.

Samsara

Samsara is the pioneer of the Connected Operations™ Cloud, which allows businesses that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations.

Samsara has been using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of its product portfolio for a number of years now – helping its customers identify opportunities to reduce emissions, analyse video data to improve road and workplace safety and unlock digital workflows for employees in the field or in the office.

Its AI dash cams have been trained to look for specific unsafe driving behaviours, such as people using their phone while behind the wheel, distracted driving, speeding, lane drifting and drowsiness. And because it’s in real-time, these systems are able to ‘nudge’ or alert drivers to correct their behaviour before it leads to anything more serious.

Lanes Group plc, the leading wastewater utility solutions provider and largest independent drainage specialist in the UK has implemented a safety programme that leverages dual-facing AI-powered dash cams to monitor drivers in real-time via a remote telematics portal back at HQ, allowing the company to take a proactive approach to driver safety and make a real difference to its drivers and those on the road.

As a result, driver behaviour scores have risen from an average of 43 up to 89/100, and its insurance payouts have decreased by £250,000 annually, thanks to fewer at-fault claims.

Transporeon

Transporeon‘s Transportation Management Platform powers a network of 1,400+ connected shippers, 158,000+ carriers, and 100+ retailers. Its Application Hubs lets users digitalize end-to-end transportation management processes — from procurement to settlement — and everything in between.

The high volume, low transaction-value nature of spot procurement is ideally suited for AI procurement processes: it provides ample training and tuning data, is tolerant of errors and cannot be managed at scale with the human kind of intelligence. In this area, we see a trend towards adoption by buyers i.e. move more or all spot buying to AI solutions.

With the Autonomous Procurement solution from Transporeon, a Trimble company, spot procurement for road transport transforms from a manual process with multiple touchpoints to a streamlined, fully automated procedure. Our AI is currently making buying decisions on about $500 million in transportation contracts per year. And this is growing at 50% per quarter. These buying decisions aren’t automatic executions of previously agreed rules. They are as much an on-the-fly decision about negotiations as a human would do. Examples of customers: AB Inbev and RPM in the USA and H.Essers in Europe are users.

Neural Concept

Trends such as vehicle electrification are forcing the transition of automotive and aerospace industries to new types of products and components, creating a need to drastically increase the speed and efficiency of product design development.

Neural Concept’s AI enables the shortcutting of design cycles without compromising on quality and breaking free from the usual, traditional constraints – breaking the trade-off between product quality and development time.

NC provides AI software for industrial design and simulation, reusing 3D raw data. The company supports organisations to exploit raw Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) data with deep learning; using a state-of-the-art AI solution to enable designers to test at the click of a button and massively simplifying the use of existing software.
Whether this is for new EVs, next-generation aircraft, or innovative power-plant components. NC has already worked with Airbus and Mubea.

Netcompany

After setting out to rethink the airports of the future, Netcompany and Copenhagen Airports (CPH) joined forces to make an AI-driven airport management platform called AIRHART – making CPH the most digitised airport in the world.

AIRHART uses real-time data, algorithms and AI to create all-new opportunities for airport mapping, and the integration of huge amounts of data on traffic handling, flight times, check-in and security. The platform optimises all processes relating to airport operations for the benefit of passengers, airlines and businesses operating in and around the airport. But it also benefits the planet too. Greater insights into events and data will be key to reducing energy consumption and lower emissions – factors essential for the green transition in the aviation industry.

The platform significantly reduces the need for manual inputs and improves maintenance and disruption prediction too. AIRHART will be utilised daily by over 4,000 employees through a uniform user interface, working as a single source of truth for all aspects of airport operations. Before AIRHART, teams had to operate a wide array of legacy systems that didn’t always communicate with each other, creating long response times and the need to input the same data in many systems. The successful launch of AIRHART has eradicated these inefficiencies without any disruptions.

Cubic Transportation Systems

To drive the mobility agenda forward, Cubic Transportation Systems and McMaster University joined forces in 2022 to create one of the largest transportation institutes in North America. The Centre is cultivating talent in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), sensors and virtual and augmented reality for new system simulations that, for example, are able to predict traffic congestion scenarios and take action to mitigate these events. The Centre has a number of research projects underway that leverage AI and machine learning techniques to control smart devices, infrastructure, traffic and environmental conditions alongside scenario simulations that are helping to build, test and validate innovations before real-world implementation.

Today’s cities and regions rely on Traffic Operations Centres to keep traffic flowing on the roads. Doing so, however, increasingly depends on being able to see into the future. By combining AI, machine learning and advanced neural net algorithms, the Centre is making it possible to gain accurate hour-by-hour predictions of complex traffic management scenarios. However, as new shared and integrated urban mobility services featuring multi-modal transportation forms take shape, operation centres will need new capabilities to micromanage the existing road infrastructure and keep people safe and moving. To this end, the centre is spearheading the development of new traffic management systems built on sophisticated sensor technologies that will deliver detailed data and insights into road usage patterns. Current research projects include a new transport management solution that will use AI to predict abnormal congestion and alleviate strains on arterial roads using long short-term memory (LSTM) models and real-time feeds from other providers.

Kognic

Artificial intelligence has experienced a breakthrough year in 2023, with the industry taking significant strides and revealing its exciting capabilities to the public. Whilst in the transportation sector we’ve also seen encouraging progress with the development of AI-powered autonomous vehicles as level 2 automation was approved for use on UK roads earlier this year. However, there is still significant work ahead in order for AI products to be consistently trusted for safety-critical applications such as autonomous mobility.

Another key challenge is the exponential growth of the datasets captured by multiple vehicle sensors: cameras, radar and LiDAR collecting an average of 1.5 terabytes per hour. This data is constantly evolving and must intelligently inform the AI models that help make decisions on the road.

Kognic is a Sweden-based start-up founded by pioneering physicists working in the field of Deep Learning. Kognic’s team of machine learning experts helps builders of AI to deliver high-performing and trusted computer vision. Working with leading Automotive and Industrial OEMs, Kognic’s platform enables human and machine alignment allowing car developers to measure and improve their ADAS/AD systems perception and performance, enabling cars to see the world around them.

Xaba

Xaba is a pioneer and leader in applying industrial artificial intelligence (AI) to enable a world of intelligent and sustainable manufacturing. Its intellectual property uses industrial AI to turn any industrial robot into a “generative robot” by making it intelligent and autonomous in both generating its own programs and executing tasks.

Xaba created the AI-driven robotics and CNC machine controller that enabled the printing of the first-ever, fully 3D-printed, functional car chassis made of advanced composite materials in combination with metallic interfaces. It was created for Project Arrow, Canada’s first zero-emissions electric vehicle. The material used and the production process also make it the first-ever fully sustainable vehicle, from manufacturing to operation.

Fiber-reinforced polymer, a more sustainable material than typically used in vehicles, was feasible because of the Xaba Intelligent Machine. The Intelligent AI-driven machine control was trained to model the physics of the Fused Deposition Model (FDM) process. Because of this, the machine control could autonomously compute process instructions driving the machine during the material deposition phase and ensure manufacturing feasibility. Without the Xaba Intelligent Machine control, it would have been impossible to manufacture such a complex geometry as the Project Arrow car body frame.

UVeye

UVeye is the brand behind the AI-powered ‘MRI for Cars,’ which is revolutionizing the automotive sector and making driving safer. UVeye has built and deployed the first automatic vehicle inspection solution, which uses computer vision and deep learning to spot mechanical and safety issues on any vehicle within seconds. The company was founded in 2016 by brothers Amir and Ohad Haver to detect car bombs – the underlying anomaly detection was then used to build a suite of automotive solutions. UVeye secured $100M in funding in May, bringing their total funding to over $200 million and their valuation close to $1 billion. UVeye’s investors and partners include GM, Toyota, Hyundai, and CarMax, while their scanners can be found in hundreds of dealerships nationwide. UVeye is changing the way we keep our cars safe.

Nexar

Nexar turns cars into vision sensors to understand the world. Its platform powers vision-connected services and apps, at scale, making new vision-based applications for better driving, powered by a crowd-sourced vision feed. Using anonymous, aggregated data captured from this network, Nexar has developed a portfolio of vision-based data services for public and private sector partners to make roadways safer and more efficient. Nexar’s platform is already deployed across hundreds of thousands of cars, detecting parking spots, managing city safety, and more.