What do robots learn from truck drivers?
Robots learn judgment from truck drivers: how to move a long, heavy vehicle safely around everyone else on the road. Holding a lane on an empty highway is the easy part. The hard part is the moments a seasoned driver reads without thinking.
Teams building self-driving trucks and yard vehicles want examples and opinions on situations like these:
- Merging and changing lanes with a loaded trailer, when gaps are short and the truck needs more room to get up to speed.
- Keeping a safe following distance, and stretching it for weight, grade and wet pavement.
- Reading other drivers: the car about to cut in, the one sitting in your blind spot.
- Backing a trailer to a dock or into a tight spot, and knowing when to stop and get out and look.
- Wide right turns in town, where the trailer tracks inside the cab.
- Work zones, lane closures, debris and hand signals from a flagger.
- Weather: crosswinds with an empty trailer, black ice, fog and heavy rain.
Engineers can model a truck's physics. What they can't easily write down is the call a good driver makes, and why. Truck driving is one of ten trades on Metagaming; see them all on the trades page.
What would you actually do?
You'd record driving demos in a sim, judge clips of self-driving trucks and, at the top rank, drive a real robot remotely. What you can take depends on your rank, and missions open as labs post them.
Everyone starts as a Rookie. Then there are three ways to train:
- Record (from Pro rank). Drive a scenario a lab asks for in a truck or driving sim on your PC, with our desktop recorder running. A mission might ask you to back a trailer to a dock, or merge onto a busy highway. The recorder logs your inputs, timing and game state, never your face, voice or identity.
- Judge (from Elite rank). Watch clips of a self-driving truck and label what happened. Was that merge safe? Was it following too close? What would you have done instead?
- Teleop (from Expert rank). Drive a real robot remotely, live, under a lab's instructions. It's the highest-trust work, for proven trainers only.
When a lab posts a mission that fits your experience, we email you. While you wait, the free skill tests let you prove skills on your pass, starting with the reaction time test. Sim drivers can also get paid to play games.
How we check your experience
You tell us about your driving when you sign up, and we check your license before any mission that depends on it. You never hand over a license number or ID to sign up.
Step 4 of the Access Pass asks your industry (pick Driving), your role, like long-haul or local delivery, your years doing it, and whether you hold a commercial driving license, as a plain yes or no.
If a mission needs a license for a certain vehicle class, we check it before you take that mission. If you answered no, you can still take missions that don't depend on one.
What does it pay?
Driving missions pay per task, like every mission on Metagaming. Most tasks pay $1–$5. We don't promise income.
Each task pays a drop: Common $1, Uncommon $5, Rare $25, Epic $50, Legendary $100, and Mythic $500+ for Genius rank only. Most missions are Common and Uncommon. A task pays once it passes quality review, and every mission shows its drop before you accept it. Rates are estimates and market rates can fluctuate. It's extra money, not a job. See how pay per task works.