MAN’s autonomous driving projects win 2024 Truck Innovation Award
The International Truck of the Year (ITOY) jury has awarded the 2024 Truck Innovation Award to MAN for its autonomous driving projects, ATLAS-L4 and ANITA. The sought-after accolade was announced at the recent Solutrans exhibition in Lyon, France.
The two projects – which aim to explore and further autonomous truck driving – tackle driving on freeways and in a container hub.
The award was presented to Lukas Walter, Senior Vice President Engineering Truck at MAN Truck & Bus; Andreas Zimmermann, Head of Electrics and Electronics Automation System; Amelie Jacquemart-Purson, Head of the ANITA project; and Sebastian Völl, Project Manager Autonomous Driving.
Driving on freeways
With the Autonomous Transport on Motorways and Expressways at Level 4 (ATLAS-L4) project, MAN is developing autonomous driving on the freeway specifically for hub-to-hub transport. “We are using the framework of the law on autonomous driving passed in Germany in 2021, which already allows the use of driverless trucks on defined routes with technical supervision. We want to test a corresponding prototype vehicle on the road by the end of 2024," explains Völl.
This project kicked off in January 2022. Since then, MAN Truck & Bus, Knorr-Bremse, Leoni, Bosch, Fernride, BTC Embedded Systems, Fraunhofer AISEC, Technische Universität München, Technische Universität Braunschweig, TÜV SÜD, Autobahn GmbH and the Würzburg Institute of Transport Sciences have been working together on ATLAS-L4, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.
Driving in a container hub
The second project, known as Autonomous Innovation in Terminal Operations (ANITA), explores autonomous driving within a container terminal. This project was also funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.
Together with Deutsche Bahn, Fresenius University of Applied Sciences and Götting KG, MAN has been investigating the integration of autonomous trucks within logistics hubs. MAN developed a self-driving truck that autonomously handles container loading from road to rail.
Following six months of collaborative practical testing at the DB Intermodal Services container depot and the DUSS container terminal in Ulm, the project ended in September 2023.
The results were conclusive, demonstrating that the autonomous truck exhibited up to a 40% increase in productivity compared to conventional vehicles. This highlights significant potential for enhancing the efficiency, predictability, and flexibility of environmentally friendly combined road and rail freight transport.
“The special thing about ANITA was the complete digital integration of the autonomous truck into the terminal process. This is a general prerequisite for the use of autonomous trucks in logistics,” says Jacquemart-Purson.
Award given by ITOY
The ITOY jury, consisting of 25 commercial vehicle editors and senior journalists representing major trucking magazines from Europe and South Africa, presents the Truck Innovation Award each year. Recognising significant technological advancements and the energy transition in the automotive sector, this award is highly sought-after.
MAN's projects secured victory with an impressive score of 97 votes, surpassing competitors such as the ZF electrified eAxle, Quantron-as-a-service (QaaS) – a zero-emission platform provider for fuel cell and battery electric commercial vehicles, and the Westwell Q-Truck – an autonomous electric heavy-duty truck designed for innovative container logistics.
International Truck of the Year Chairman Gianenrico Griffini says the two MAN projects were highly deserving winners. "MAN's ANITA and ATLAS-L4 projects prove that autonomous driving is feasible today and can have a role in making transport operations safer and more efficient, laying the foundation for innovative transport and logistics concepts,” he comments.
“A great honour”
Dr Frederik Zohm, Executive Board Member for Research and Development at MAN Truck & Bus, says the award is a great honour for ANITA, ATLAS-L4 and the partners involved. “It is also an acknowledgement of the achievements of all our colleagues at MAN, who have been driving automated transport forward with great expertise and passion for many years. Alongside digitalisation and CO2-free drives, this is the third key pillar in the transformation to the climate-friendly, safe, efficient and intelligently networked transport of the future. From 2030, we want to offer autonomous trucks in series production for transport on defined routes between logistics hubs,” he says.
It's the second time that MAN has won the Truck Innovation Award. In 2019, MAN’s automated construction site safety vehicle AFAS won the coveted industry prize in the Truck Innovation Award’s inaugural year.
