AV company Gatik and Loblaw deploy Canada's first autonomous delivery vehicle

In a Canadian first, a fully autonomous delivery vehicle with no safety driver onboard has been deployed on public roads in the Greater Toronto Area.

Self-driving technology company Gatik and Canadian grocer Loblaw Co. announced the milestone Oct. 5 after spending nearly three years piloting the autonomous vehicle (AV) technology on a 21-kilometre route in Brampton, Ont.

“This is the first fully driverless commercial operation in Canada,” Gatik CEO Gautam Narang told Automotive News Canada.

A specially outfitted Ford Transit 350 box truck began making several daily circuits between a Loblaw fulfillment centre in Brampton and a nearby Real Canadian Superstore retail location without a safety driver in early August. It is shuttling online grocery orders as part of Loblaw’s PC Express service.

“These are surface streets with traffic lights, four-way intersections, three-way intersections,” and no shortage of aggressive drivers, Narang said.

Gatik’s driverless system, on the other hand, is conservative by design.

Narang said it has a 100-per-cent safety record with no accidents tracing back to the start of deployment on the Loblaw route in early 2020. But that does not mean the automated system has been flawless since the outset. Up until August, the vehicle had a safety driver onboard, and Narang said that during the initial stages of the project, the driver did have to intervene.

But those days are over.

With the driverless system having built an intricate understanding of the route, Gatik, Loblaw and the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO), signed off on pulling the safety driver out of the cab earlier this year. The Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered company also consulted with municipal authorities and local first responders throughout the process, Narang said.

The autonomous software takes the delivery truck to a maximum speed of about 70 km/h on the route, and employs safety workarounds, such as making three right turns to avoid taking an unprotected left turn.

David Markwell, chief technology and analytics officer for Loblaw, which has about 2,400 stores across Canada, said “being the first in Canada with this technology” highlights the company’s drive to improve the grocery shopping experience.

‘SUPPLY CHAIN EFFICIENCY’

“We’ve demonstrated that autonomous driving technology enables supply chain efficiency, moving more orders more frequently for our customers,” he said in a release.

Though fully driverless, the delivery truck outfitted with Gatik’s autonomous driving software stack and accompanying hardware, still has several human links.

For the initial phase of the rollout, a safety passenger with access to an emergency stop button, as well as a chase vehicle, will take part in each autonomous run. Gatik said these human resources will eventually be removed and oversight handed over entirely to “remote supervisors.”

The remote supervisor monitors the vehicle in case it encounters an anomaly that triggers what Narang calls a “graceful recovery.” In that scenario, the truck pulls to the side of the road and waits for the monitor to make a “high-level decision,” such as ordering it to pull around a construction site to proceed.

Initially, one person will be watching for any alerts from the truck, but Gatik intends to have monitors overseeing multiple trucks in the future.

That process has already played out in the United States, where Gatik has been operating a fully driverless route for retailer Walmart Inc. since August 2021. Narang said the company has upped its truck-to-monitor ratio as the deployment in Arkansas has progressed.

As with its Loblaw project, Gatik’s collaboration with Walmart and its other partners focus on what is known as the middle-mile delivery market.

GROWING MOMENTUM

Robert Love, head of the autonomous vehicle group at Canadian law firm BLG, said this segment of the AV market has the most momentum in Canada currently, largely because the vehicles can operate on fixed, repeatable routes.

Over the past five years, Love added, driverless vehicle advances have proved to be evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary.

“We’re going to see the move to fully autonomous vehicles with certain limited applications … before we ever get to a stage where we have full deployment of AVs anywhere, owned by anyone, doing anything.”

This progressive approach will allow related issues, such as how insurers tackle legal liability if an AV is involved in an accident, to be improved upon as new AV applications hit the street, Love said.

Love, as well as Ross McKenzie, managing director of the University of Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR), said Ontario government regulations introduced in 2016 that allow for AV technology pilots have made the province the leading jurisdiction for driverless technology in Canada.

Ontario’s regulations also continue to evolve, McKenzie said, with the onus on pilot participants to work with the MTO on expanding into new areas of testing. He said the ministry actively engages with WatCAR on ways current regulations are impeding new deployments.

Gatik has been working with the MTO to roll out its autonomous technology on Ontario roads since 2019, and plans to continue growing its Canadian operations.

In addition to the Loblaw route that has gone fully driverless, the tech company has been operating four other routes for the grocery chain. All four trucks currently have safety drivers onboard and start their journey at a Loblaw fulfillment centre at the north end of Toronto, before driving to retail stores in nearby Mississauga, Brampton and Etobicoke.

Narang said the company’s goal is to go fully driverless on the four additional routes once its technology has mastered them. It plans to broaden its partnership with Loblaw to new locations in the future.

Gatik also has a fast-growing Toronto office it set up to tap into Canadian talent from the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and other engineering hotbeds. Of the company’s more than 100 total staff, about 40 are located in Toronto. Narang said the company plans to grow its Toronto headcount to 200 by 2025.