Komatsu presents an Autonomous Haulage System dump truck on Mine Expo 2016. It was designed from the ground up to be completely autonomous. As you can see, there’s no longer a driver’s cab. In fact, aside from the direction the dumping bed raises, the self-driving truck doesn’t really have a front or back. It can drive in either direction equally well thanks to four-wheel steering, which in turn means a strip mine doesn’t need to allocate space for one of the massive vehicles to turn around after each trip so a driver can see where they’re going. It can simply shuttle back and forth, reversing direction as needed.
