The lane will be located on the I-45 highway, which operates between the two Texas cities. Much like its Dallas terminal, Aurora’s new terminal in Houston will work to support and services driverless trucks at a commercial scale. More broadly, the terminals house, maintain, prepare, inspect, and deploy its autonomous trucks between destinations.

A dedicated terminal blueprint implements a layout and list of features that ensure these terminals are ready for the commercial launch of driverless freight operations. Here, the blueprint is designed to maximize the time autonomous trucks are on the road hauling freight. On-site weigh stations, for example, support enhanced pre-trip inspections that ensure Aurora’s trucks are compliant with regulatory standards while allowing them to bypass inspection sites on the road.

Aurora’s Houston terminal is located in a logistics hub near the company’s pilot customers, including FedEx. This proximity allows Aurora to quickly integrate autonomous trucks into the middle-mile operations of these customers.

With the new version, Aurora is looking to accelerate the system’s commercial launch and increase its weekly hauls of freight for partners such as FedEx, Uber Freight, Werner, and Schneider. Aurora Driver Beta 5.0 is also powering Aurora’s own ride-hailing fleet, which continues testing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The new beta unlocks key safety-critical and complex highway driving capabilities, enabling the Aurora Driver to operate autonomously in more scenarios. The system can now detect and appropriately respond to emergency vehicles – such as ambulances, fire engines, and law enforcement vehicles – and navigate lanes with temporary barriers. The company further confirmed that the system would be capable of safely re-entering traffic, following the resolution of an error that prompted the Aurora Driver to pull over to the shoulder.

Following the launch, Aurora is now preparing to launch its autonomous driving system for commercial use. The next phase of Aurora Driver, referred to by the company as Feature Complete, is expected to be achieved at the end of Q1 2023 – when the capabilities required for commercial launch have been implemented, and all policy interventions removed.

After reaching Feature Complete, Aurora Driver will undergo an extensive validation phase where its capabilities will be refined and equipped for driverless commercial operation, which Aurora expects to begin in 2024.

To help Uber Freight customers meet the heightened delivery demand the season brings, Aurora’s autonomous trucking service, Aurora Horizon, is making weekly hauls of consumer and wholesale goods. The autonomy of the expanded service was highlighted in a use case involving Veritiv Corp., a distributor of customized packaging solutions. Here, goods were transported to retail, education, and healthcare customers – with the first and final legs of deliveries across western Texas and New Mexico handled by human drivers.

In testing its autonomous technologies through the busy holiday season, Aurora is aiming to highlight its potential to respond quickly to new demands and fluctuating supply chains. As the company works with additional carriers on Uber Freight’s network, it will incorporate learnings from this pilot into its subscription service for carriers and private fleets.

Further along its partnership, Aurora and Uber Freight aim to unlock autonomous truck capacity for carriers with Aurora Horizon, deploying it to customers in the coming years and serving carriers across the Uber Freight platform.

Autonomous technology has the potential to greatly optimize vehicle utilization. However, higher utilization means autonomous trucks will require preventative maintenance more frequently and need immediate access to corrective maintenance. For Aurora, on-site maintenance is a crucial element of meeting these unique service needs as it works towards commercializing its autonomous trucks.

As part of the pilot, Ryder’s technicians will work alongside Aurora’s own at the South Dallas terminal across several areas. Together, they will maintain Aurora’s fleet of autonomous Class 8 tractors – undertaking inspections, preventative maintenance, and repairs. They will also inspect and maintain trailers for pilot hauls and compliance with standards set by the DOT.

The partnership will also see Aurora leverage Ryder’s experiences in fleet management to roll out Aurora Horizon – its driver-as-a-service subscription product. The company expects on-site maintenance in its terminals to play a key role as it works to increase pilot customer hauls to 100 per week, a target it anticipates reaching at the end of 2023.

From this week, the Aurora Driver will begin weekly autonomous hauls between Dallas and Houston with safety drivers on board. Over the course of the pilot, load frequency is expected to increase as Schneider expands its relationship with Aurora.

For Aurora itself, working with Schneider will accelerate its progress toward delivering Aurora Horizon – its subscription-based autonomous trucking product. Here, the pilot will strengthen and prepare Aurora Horizon ahead of its launch in several areas.

It will for example, support the development of Aurora Driver through the system’s ability to learn from its own operations. Weekly hauls will allow Aurora itself to test the durability of its new trucks for commercial operation and deployment. Likewise, Aurora has confirmed that Schneider will help test and validate the service through the pilot.

From this week, trucks powered by Aurora Driver, the supplier’s automated driving platform, will haul loads between loads between Fort Worth and El Paso on behalf of Werner. The 600-mile lane represents the middle leg of one of the busiest commercial thoroughfares for Werner and the U.S. trucking industry at large. By introducing an autonomous route between Fort Worth and El Paso, Aurora hopes to help Werner move freight efficiently and reliably.

Aurora’s collaboration with Werner works to broaden its customer base, including multiple types of carrier. The pilot itself is similarly designed to advance two of its key technologies – Aurora Driver and Aurora Horizon, its autonomous truck product, to develop a robust service for carriers. Today, operators are accompanying each truck in the pilot fleet on weekly hauls, ready to take over if necessary. Over the next several months, both Aurora and Werner expect to increase the frequency of these loads and will explore higher levels of autonomy for vehicles in this lane.

For Aurora, the pilot also represents the next step towards its goal to deploying Aurora Driver at scale. In committing to its pilot with Werner, the company activated a pair of new terminal sites to service the route and developed the necessary infrastructure required to operate it.

• Custom-developed Hyundai models to be tested in pilot smart cities
• Partnership aims to deploy autonomous vehicles quickly, broadly and safely
• Hyundai’s new-generation fuel-cell vehicle to be first test model for joint project

Hyundai Motor Company and Aurora, a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, announced a strategic partnership to bring self-driving Hyundai vehicles to market by 2021. This partnership will incorporate Aurora’s self-driving technology into Hyundai vehicles starting with models custom-developed and launched in test programs and pilot cities. Over the longer term, Hyundai and Aurora will work to commercialize self-driving vehicles worldwide.

To start, the partnership will focus on the ongoing development of hardware and software for automated and autonomous driving and the back-end data services required for Level 4 automation. Level 4 autonomous vehicles defined by SAE can operate without human input or oversight under select conditions. The goal of the partnership is to deploy autonomous driving quickly, broadly and safely.

“We know the future of transportation is autonomous, and autonomous driving technology needs to be proven in the real-world to accelerate deployment in a safe and scalable manner,” said Dr. Woong Chul Yang, Vice Chairman of Hyundai Motor. “Combining our advanced vehicle technology that embeds the latest safety features with Aurora’s leading suite of Level 4 autonomous technology will advance this revolution in mobility with Hyundai in a leadership position.”

Hyundai and Aurora share the common vision of improving safety and mobility on the world’s roads, and together bring the skills and experience required to successfully introduce this technology at scale. For nearly 50 years, Hyundai has been a leader in vehicle design, safety and manufacturing, catapulting the company to become one of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers together with its Kia Motors Corporation affiliate.

For the last two decades, Aurora’s founders have spearheaded the self-driving revolution, building teams and pioneering modern machine learning techniques now on the cusp of transforming transportation. Together, Hyundai and Aurora will move quickly to bring self-driving technology to market around the world.

“Aurora is excited to partner with Hyundai Motor to make the social benefits of self-driving available globally,” said Dr. Chris Urmson, CEO of Aurora. “This partnership combines Hyundai’s strengths in vehicle design, safety and manufacturing with Aurora’s expertise in self-driving technologies to make a positive difference in the world.”

Hyundai Motor’s partnership with Aurora is part of the company’s ongoing efforts towards realizing fully autonomous driving. Hyundai first began testing autonomous vehicles on public roads of the USA in 2015, having been granted a license by the state of Nevada.

Source: Hyundai Motor Company

• New partnership of Volkswagen Group and Aurora will provide expertise and experience bringing self-driving cars to our roads quickly, broadly and safely
• Aurora is supporting the Volkswagen Group to make their vision of the future ‘Mobility for all, at the push of a button’ becoming reality

The Volkswagen Group and self-driving technology company, Aurora Innovation, announced a strategic partnership at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV, U.S.A. The collaboration brings the two companies together to bring self-driving electric vehicles to cities as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) fleets.

The Volkswagen Group defined its goal of becoming a global leader in autonomous driving with its dedicated Self-Driving System (SDS) in its future program “TOGETHER – Strategy 2025”. This strategic direction builds on a long tradition for the Volkswagen Group as a leader in the fields of automated vehicle and advanced mobility technologies. In 2005, a Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab-Stanford University team claimed victory at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, which is widely considered the dawn of the automated vehicle era.

Chief Digital Officer Johann Jungwirth: “Our vision is ‘Mobility for all, at the push of a button’. This means that we want to offer mobility for all people around the world. Mobility also for children, elderly, sick and visually impaired people, really for all. ‘At the push of a button’ stands for simplicity and the easiness of use. In the future people can of course use our mobility app or digital virtual assistant to hail a self-driving electric vehicle to drive them conveniently door-to-door, or use our Volkswagen OneButton which has GPS, connectivity and a compass, as a small beautiful key fob with maximum convenience. Working with Aurora, leading self-driving system company, will give us a giant leap forward in our mission to become the world’s leading provider of sustainable mobility, with self-driving vehicles. Our aim is to create new Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) solutions which customers will be really passionate about because they have been tailored to the human with highest safety standards, best-in-class user experience and digital intelligence. For me this is the reinvention of mobility and the automobile.”

Self-driving technology is set to become the centerpiece of future personal mobility. The collaboration with Aurora will provide valuable experience with the world-class engineering team to the ongoing development of software and hardware for driverless vehicles, and, additionally, mobility services for urban and rural areas. Thereby the Volkswagen Group is stepping up the pace. As the Self-Driving System (SDS) reaches the required maturity and safety levels in the first cities, it can be integrated across the Group brands, for different product categories: from fully self-driving pods like SEDRIC, shuttles or delivery vans to self-driving trucks without a cabin.

Over the past six months, specialists from the Volkswagen Group, have already been working intensively with experts from Aurora to integrate Aurora’s self-driving system including sensors, hardware and software, such as Machine Learning and AI technology in Volkswagen Group’s vehicle platforms. With the customer experience at the center of this technology development, the Volkswagen Group is focused on creating new solutions tailored to the best-in-class user experience with a focus on safety, convenience and usability. Cities need such smart mobility solutions to solve their traffic, pollution and traffic safety challenges.

Chris Urmson, CEO of Aurora: “Our priority at Aurora is to make self-driving cars a reality quickly, broadly and safely, and we know we will get there faster by partnering with innovative automakers like the Volkswagen Group. This partnership establishes a deep collaboration using Aurora’s self-driving technology, and together we will bring self-driving vehicles to market at scale.”

Based in Palo Alto, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA, Aurora designs and builds self-driving technology, partnering with automakers to integrate, pilot and deploy advanced self-driving platforms into vehicles. Founded by Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chris Urmson, Chief Product Officer (CPO) Sterling Anderson and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Drew Bagnell, Aurora is working to solve today’s most complex AI, automation and engineering challenges to improve transportation and positively impact our cities.

Source: VW Group