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Technical studies on automated driving of passenger cars were started in the 1950s, but those on heavy trucks were started in the mid-1990s, and only a few projects have dealt with truck automation, which include “Chauffeur” within the EU project T-TAP from the mid-1990s, truck automation by California PATH from around 2000, “KONVOI” in Germany from 2005, and “Energy ITS” by Japan from 2008. The objectives of truck automation are energy saving and enhanced transportation capacity by platooning, and eventually possible reduction of personnel cost by unmanned operation of following vehicles. The sensing technologies for automated vehicle control are computer vision, radar, lidar, laser scanners, localization by GNSS, and vehicle to vehicle communications. Experiments of platooning of three or four heavy trucks have shown the effectiveness of platooning in achieving energy saving due to short gaps between vehicles.
Tsugawa et al. (2016) studied this question.