Three staff of the UN World Food Programme were killed in Sudan in April, in the first days of the war there. They were not the first: attacks on humanitarian workers have risen for a decade and are now, the UN says, at their highest level since the Second World War. The agency’s answer, announced this week at the International Telecommunication Union’s AI for Good summit in Geneva, is to take the driver out of the truck. From 2024, WFP will trial autonomous vehicles to deliver food in places where sending a person is too dangerous.
Where the idea came from
“Sometimes it becomes dangerous to send our staff or drivers into these places,” said Bernhard Kowatsch, head of WFP’s innovation accelerator. The thinking began in Aleppo, he said, during the 2012–2016 siege, when UN staff were trapped in the city and could not get food in. Airdrops — the traditional answer — are very expensive and need a large open area to land on, and in a besieged city there was none. What was needed was a truck that could drive a known route through a contested zone with nobody in it.
How the trucks will work
WFP already operates about 50 vehicles on its supply routes in South Sudan, where 7.7 million people face acute food insecurity and floods have cut roads for much of the year. Under two projects, the agency will fit vehicles for remote operation: an AI system fuses satellite imagery and on-board sensors to plot the route and handle the driving, and a human operator supervises from a safe distance and takes over when needed. Nobody rides in the cab. The trials start next year; if they work, the model spreads to other missions.
Why it is harder than it sounds
Driverless cars in San Francisco have high-definition maps, lane markings and a network; a WFP route in Jonglei state has none of the three, and a flooded dirt track changes shape weekly. The satellite link is the vulnerable part — a truck that loses its connection in hostile territory is a stationary target with a valuable cargo. And a truck without a driver is also a truck without anyone to negotiate a checkpoint, which in South Sudan is most of the job.
The Bangladesh angle
Bangladesh does not have war zones, but it has the other half of WFP’s problem: places a truck cannot reach. After a cyclone the coastal unions of Satkhira and Bhola are islands for days, and the chars of the Jamuna are always islands. The relevant technology here is not the driverless truck but its cousins — the cargo drone and the autonomous boat — and WFP, which runs one of its largest operations at Cox’s Bazar, has tested drones there for mapping since 2018. A drone that carries 20 kg of dry food across a flooded river is a smaller idea than a self-driving truck through Sudan, and a closer one.
Source: Reuters, via Prothom Alo.
