Einride has announced that it will deploy its autonomous vehicle for full-time operations in a new commercial partnership with GE Appliances.
The partnership will leverage up to seven shuttles to transport goods autonomously transported between a GE Appliances manufacturing facility and warehouse in Selmer, TN from Monday to Thursday. For Einride, these operations will help showcase how its freight capacity as a service (FaaS) model can be enabled with autonomous vehicles. This long-term deployment follows the company’s prior pilots with GE Appliances – first in a gated environment at the company’s Appliance Park headquarters in 2021, followed by a driverless public road pilot in Selmer in 2022.
The Einride autonomous vehicle forms part of a larger interoperability project in Selmer working to create an automated logistics flow to improve employee ergonomics and safety around loading docks while increasing efficiency. Supporting the partnership between Einride and GE Appliances will be technologies from GE Appliances partners, including TaskWatch and Slip Robotics. Here, TaskWatch’s AI cameras trigger a control board to raise and lower the dock doors, dock plate, lock the Einride autonomous vehicle into place and notify the SlipBot autonomous mobile robot that the Einride vehicle is ready for loading. The electric-powered SlipBot then autonomously loads and unloads the vehicle.
