While self-driving cars sound like a pretty cool idea, especially if you don’t particularly enjoy driving long distances or being stuck in jams, it seems that self-driving vehicles could be used for more than just providing creature comforts, as evidenced by a company called Royal who will be putting their self-driving trucks to work later this year.

These trucks will be used as part of a state Department of Transportation pilot program to help with highway construction in Florida. The trucks will be completely driverless and can be controlled by either setting it on a GPS Waypoint navigation, controlling it remotely, or use a leader/follower program.

Now you might be thinking that these trucks are big which means that they are potentially more dangerous too, so wouldn’t the lack of a driver be a bad idea? We suppose it might, but its creators have installed attenuators to provide a rolling crash barrier, which should hopefully help prevent accidents to workers and motorists, or at the very least reduce as much damage as possible.

Speaking to Associated Press, study author Gerald Ullman, of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute said, “Connected and autonomous vehicles in general are viewed as the future of surface transportation, and this technology may be one of the first ways in which it gets commercialized.”

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