First responders, healthcare providers, national guardsmen⁠—they are all workers who have been considered essential since the earliest days of their trade, the people we depend on in the aftermath of natural disasters, crises, and, most recently, pandemics.

But COVID-19 has birthed a new class of essential emergency workers, like the crew stocking supermarket shelves and delivering to-go dinners, social workers, bank tellers, and truck drivers. This lot signed up for a paycheck, not a pandemic, but working through this crisis to help ensure continuity of critical services like food supply has exposed these workers to profound risk.

On an ordinary day, these essential workers come into contact with hundreds of people every day, each one a possible disease vector.

This new normal presents an opportunity for a fresh vision of autonomous vehicles focused on public health and safety. There are countless examples of small-scale deployments of autonomous vehicles that assist or could assist essential workers in avoiding human contact. Three specific examples are worth highlighting.

 

Driverless delivery

Nuro, an autonomous vehicle company specializing in completely driverless delivery vehicles, received only the second fully autonomous test-drive permit from California in early April. In a statement, the company expressly tied the new permit to the fight against COVID-19, noting that autonomous grocery and food delivery can cut down on human-to-human contact and provide essential services to society’s most vulnerable.

A company statement said: “Our R2 fleet is custom-designed to change the very nature of driving, and the movement of goods, by allowing people to remain safely at home while their groceries, medicines, and packages, are brought to them.”

 

Autonomous medical transports

The Jacksonville, FL, Mayo Clinic uses autonomous vehicles to transport medical supplies and COVID-19 tests, reducing human contact with possible pathogens. The shuttles, facilitated via a partnership between the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, Beep, and Navya, transport tests collected at drive-through locations.

“Using artificial intelligence enables us to protect staff from exposure to this contagious virus by using cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technology and frees up staff time that can be dedicated to direct treatment and care for patients,” Dr. Kent Thielen, CEO of the Mayo Clinic, said in praising the program. “We are grateful to JTA, Beep, and Navya for their partnership in these challenging times.”

 

Meal provision

General Motors’ subsidiary Cruise has been using its self-driving vehicles to deliver meals to vulnerable populations in a partnership with the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and SF New Deal. Cruise’s efforts not only benefit seniors and those with preexisting conditions by allowing them to stay safely sheltered in place, but also allows non-profit workers to devote their time in more meaningful ways.

“The volunteers who have been freed up by the delivery resources Cruise is providing are now able to redirect their efforts to provide more support directly to our partner organizations, bring PPE to partner sites and restaurants, and seek out more sources of funding to provide even more meals to our neighbors in need here in San Francisco,” SF New Deal Executive Director Lenore Estrada told GM Authority.

 

The experimental use of autonomous vehicles to serve the most vulnerable and enhance the capabilities of health care and non-profits amidst the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that there are significant public safety applications for autonomous transportation.

Unfortunately, neither the regulatory structure nor the technology is currently advanced enough to facilitate widespread use of the technology to flatten the curve immediately. But what about next time? Whether it be a hurricane that cuts off citizens from traditional delivery routes, forest fires rendering roads dangerous for human passage, or another deadly pandemic, autonomous transit can help.

The first step is to create a regulatory system that encourages investment and provides clarity to developers. The present situation⁠—each state with its own competing regulatory regime⁠—is untenable in the long run. At the outset of the pandemic, there were calls from U.S. House Republicans to revisit autonomous vehicle legislation as a mechanism to deal with COVID-19. Unfortunately, their call to action fell on deaf ears outside of their conference.

Sooner or later, the federal government will have to set standards and provide national regulations to replace the state-by-state system in place today. For the sake of our newly minted front-line essential workers, the sooner, the better.

 

Eric Tanenblatt wrote this article for Futurride. He is the Global Chair of Public Policy and Regulation and leads the Autonomous Vehicles Group at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm operating in more than 75 countries.