Products

Delivering the Holidays: How Autonomous Trucks Can Transform the Holiday Surge

the Aurora Team — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 01:48:44 GMT

Trucking is the backbone of American life, providing consumers, businesses, governments, and supply chains with the essential goods for our daily lives — including the foods we eat, the goods we rely on, and the medicine we need. Chances are, most of the things in your home were delivered on a truck.

The impact of trucking is never more evident than during the holiday season. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), November and December make up nearly 20% of annual retail sales, and this number is only expected to rise.

As customer demand surges over the final months of the year, let’s explore the impact of holiday shipping on the industry — and some of the ways autonomous trucking can help solve some of those pain points.

Capability spotlight: Stormy weather

Jim Curry — Wed, 24 May 2023 15:30:00 GMT

Training the Aurora Driver to detect and respond to dangerous road conditions caused by inclement weather

Texas is no stranger to tempestuous weather—just a few months ago, I was hunkering down with some of our vehicle operators as a thunderstorm wiped through Dallas. The state’s occasional snow, sleet, or rain storms are typically short and intense, and can sometimes be accompanied by howling winds.

The Aurora Driver is Feature Complete

Sterling Anderson — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 13:05:00 GMT

Today I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve entered the final phase of development for the product we plan to launch commercially next year.

Capability spotlight: Fault management, part 2

Burhan Muzaffar — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 18:01:38 GMT

Training the Aurora Driver to recover from faults and return to the road

Countdown to Feature Complete

the Aurora Team — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:00:00 GMT

Closing out 2022 with our fifth quarterly beta release of the Aurora Driver

As illustrated in our Aurora Horizon Product Roadmap, we committed to releasing three new capabilities in Q4 of 2022. Building on all of the capabilities contained in our previous beta releases, Aurora Driver Beta 5.0 includes important updates that will allow the Aurora Driver to safely handle some of the trickiest parts of highway driving.

Responding to active emergency vehicles

Detecting and appropriately responding to an emergency vehicle can be challenging—emergency vehicles come in all shapes and sizes (e.g., police cruisers, firetrucks, ambulances) and don’t always behave predictably or follow normal road rules.

To teach the Aurora Driver to reliably recognize and appropriately handle encounters with emergency vehicles, we’ve exposed it to on-road data, virtual tests, and closed track tests. By converting real-world data of emergency vehicle interactions into simulations, we’ve generated thousands of variant training scenarios, and built confidence in the Aurora Driver’s ability to safely respond to emergency vehicles out on the road.

Today, when the Aurora Driver encounters an active emergency vehicle while hauling commercial loads for our pilot customers, it will alert a remote assistant via Aurora Beacon for backup and, based upon feedback from the remote assistant, will activate hazards, change lanes, or pull over if necessary.

Capability spotlight: Responding to emergency vehicles | Aurora

Nemanja Djuric and Gary Yang — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 05:00:00 GMT

How we’re training the Aurora Driver to safely share the road with law enforcement and first responders

Our Aurora Driver-powered trucks will travel hundreds of miles while hauling customer freight back and forth across Texas. During those trips, they will inevitably encounter emergency vehicles—in fact, there’s a good chance they’ll come across at least one per trip.

Automating the middle-mile with Aurora Horizon | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 04:00:00 GMT

How we plan to deliver on the promise of autonomous trucking

Aurora has an audacious mission to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. As part of our mission to truly deliver on the promise of these benefits, we are creating a transportation ecosystem by partnering with automakers, fleet management companies, freight carriers, and fleet service partners.

Capability spotlight: Prioritizing pedestrian safety | Aurora

Varun Ramakrishna — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Eyes on the road(map): The Aurora Driver advances toward “feature complete” milestone | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Aurora Driver Beta 4.0 includes key capabilities to enable commercial launch

We are making strong progress toward the commercial launch of our Aurora Horizon autonomous trucking service, and we’re excited to share that we have released the fourth beta version of our flagship product, the Aurora Driver.

Aurora Driver Beta 4.0 contains new capabilities and improvements to many of the capabilities we’ve released in past betas. Each of our beta releases builds on the ones that came before, which are collectively designed to culminate in a collection of all the capabilities that will make the Aurora Driver “feature complete.”

Defining “feature complete”

In just six months, we expect to have established all of the key capabilities necessary to launch Aurora Horizon and removed all policy interventions. In other words, the Aurora Driver will be able to autonomously navigate all of the common driving situations we expect it will encounter on our launch lane while hauling loads for Aurora customers. We expect to reach this stage at the end of the first quarter of 2023, at which time we would consider the Aurora Driver to be “feature complete.” For the rest of 2023, we expect to continue to improve performance and validate the Aurora Driver, and by the end of 2023 we expect to have closed the Aurora Driver Safety Case.

As illustrated on our roadmap, we committed to releasing two new capabilities in Q3 of 2022—detecting lane markings that have shifted due to construction and responding to road debris. Over the past quarter, we have developed, tested, and delivered both of these capabilities, which will enable the Aurora Driver to autonomously handle new kinds of common obstacles.

Expecting the unexpected

While driving on public roads, there is always a chance that the Aurora Driver will come across an unexpected obstacle—such as a fallen tree branch or new lane markings. To be a safe road user, the Aurora Driver must be able to quickly and reliably detect and respond to unfamiliar objects and boundaries.

Shifted lane markings

As we’ve noted before, Texas highways are notorious for year-round construction, and navigating construction zones is an incredibly tricky thing for an autonomous vehicle.

While the Aurora Atlas, our HD map, is regularly updated with new information about the state of the road, construction zones can appear and disappear without advance notice. Sometimes, traffic will be directed around a new construction zone by temporary repainted lane lines. This creates a mismatch between the Aurora Driver’s internal map and the physical reality of the road.

Because these temporary lane lines appear somewhat frequently along our commercial routes, we’ve been working to enable the Aurora Driver to perceive the new lane lines in real-time and understand that it should follow that new path instead of the path that exists in the Atlas. When triggered by the appearance of new alternative lane lines, the Aurora Driver will be able to deviate from the Atlas and rely on its advanced perception system instead of on a human.

Road debris

Last quarter, we shared an inside look at how we’ve been training the Aurora Driver to detect various kinds of road debris. Road debris is extremely common and can be very dangerous, especially when vehicles are moving at highway speeds—according to AAA, nearly 37% of all deaths in road debris-related collisions occurred following a driver swerving to avoid hitting an object.

We always start off our capability development process in simulation. We exposed the Aurora Driver to over 10k virtual road debris tests, then validated its performance on private test tracks. During the past quarter, we enabled the Aurora Driver’s ability to respond to the road debris we encounter while hauling goods on public roads across Texas for our commercial pilots, such as tire shreds, garbage, fallen boxes, vegetation, and even abandoned furniture.

Unveiling our Aurora Horizon Product Roadmap | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Capability spotlight: Fault management | Aurora

Tony Stentz — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Unlocking the full potential of self-driving vehicles | Aurora

Sterling Anderson — Wed, 04 May 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Capability spotlight: Tackling construction | Aurora

Yanbing Li — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

While driving any vehicle in the real world, you can expect to encounter anything from open roads and blue skies to heavy rain and stop-and-go traffic. And if you’ve ever driven in Texas, you know that its roadways are infamous for year-round construction. Construction is a common feature on many of our nation’s major freight corridors, so to operate on the U.S. highway system and deliver goods for our commercial partners safely and on time, the Aurora Driver must be able to navigate construction zones autonomously. But construction zones are tricky—they can pop up and disappear without notice, display confusing signage, and consist of hazardous materials, moving vehicles, and pedestrians.

Aurora Driver-powered vehicles have driven through over 3,500 miles of construction on Texas roads in the last nine months. On our Dallas to El Paso route alone, our vehicles encounter about 40 construction sites a week. Our data science team has analyzed hundreds of terabytes of data on all of the trips we’ve driven on Texas roadways to determine which types of construction-related challenges tend to occur most often on our commercial routes. By focusing our time and resources on overcoming these challenges first, we prioritize developing capabilities for the Aurora Driver that have the highest impact. Acquiring these critical capabilities allows our trucks to operate in autonomy for longer stretches of time and gets us closer to delivering on the promise of autonomous long-haul trucking.

Last week I rode in an Aurora Driver-powered Peterbilt truck for 11 hours, pulling a commercial load for our partner, Werner, between El Paso and Dallas. I got to witness first-hand the high frequency and complexity of construction zones on the route, and how much progress the Aurora Driver has made in navigating these construction zones autonomously.

The Transferable Hardware Behind Aurora Driver-Powered Cars and Trucks | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Aurora Horizon is Taking the Wheel in Texas | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 04:00:00 GMT

From Technology to Product: Introducing Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Meet our subscription services that will transform the movement of goods and people with the Aurora Driver by providing carriers, fleets, and networks a suite of operational tools.

While self-driving technology is intricate and complex, the products and services it will enable need not be. As we prepare to launch our first commercial products, we’ve designed simple, application-specific product suites to integrate seamlessly within our customers’ businesses and empower their operations. Introducing our product suite is an important step to enabling carriers, private fleets, and ride-hailing networks to operate Aurora-powered trucks and cars.

The Aurora Driver Development Program: a structured approach for the creation of Aurora-powered vehicles | Aurora

Sterling Anderson — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Meet “Fusion,” the Aurora Driver’s next-generation hardware designed to power our trucks and cars when we commercially launch | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Whether it’s detecting a pedestrian over three football fields away, registering the speed of oncoming traffic, or driving through thick dust clouds or a blindingly bright sunset, the Aurora Driver has to see it all. It also has to know what to do with the world it sees.

Based on years of experience, we’ve honed a holistic and deeply integrated approach to building the Aurora Driver’s hardware and software, enabling it to effectively and accurately make hundreds of decisions a second to navigate a safe path through the world. Our integrated hardware suite is made up of cameras, radar, and lidar sensors and is designed to be much stronger than the sum of its parts, allowing it to handle even the trickiest of edge cases.

We’ve also built the Aurora Driver for commercial scale, and today, we're excited to announce that we’ve reached a crucial development milestone in our path to commercialization.

Unveiling our next-generation hardware kit

“Fusion” is the next generation of our hardware kit, which will debut in commercial pilots this year and lay the foundation for the launch of our trucking and ride-hailing businesses in 2023 and 2024, respectively. With more powerful sensors condensed into a sleek, modular automotive-grade rack and a new powerhouse computer, Fusion feeds the Aurora Driver higher-resolution data even faster. The end result is a feature-complete, safer, more reliable Driver ready to be deployed at a commercial scale.

We internally nicknamed this kit “Fusion” because it’s one of our biggest feats since joining forces with Uber ATG's exceptional hardware team. For years, both Aurora and Uber ATG have been developing hardware for specific use cases. Fusion “fuses'' the best of many generations of hardware development from each team into a single, optimized, deeply integrated system.

Powerful high-resolution custom camera suite with 360-degree field of view (FOV)

Our hardware leadership team is unmatched when it comes to building cost-effective high-performance cameras and incorporating the latest top-of-the-line camera technology. To make our new 360-degree cameras, we combined the most advanced automotive-grade sensor technology with custom-designed lenses. Now, we’re able to detect objects even in challenging lighting situations like facing headlight glare and sun glare, and entering and exiting tunnels.

Developing the Aurora Driver to move millions of goods a day | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Wed, 19 May 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Before the pandemic accelerated the shift to buying goods online, trucks were already moving nearly 12 billion tons of freight a year. Trucking is the backbone of the American economy, and we’re building the Aurora Driver to make the industry safer, faster, more reliable, and more efficient. Today, it takes almost three days for a truck to deliver goods from Dallas to Los Angeles. When it’s deployed on this route, we expect the Aurora Driver to make the 1500-mile trip in less than 24 hours.

Over the past several years, we’ve laid the foundation to deliver the Aurora Driver by building partnerships with truck manufacturers and making rapid progress on our next-generation technology. Now, we’re expanding deployment with shippers and carriers as we refine our Driver and fit its operations to their needs. Over the next year, expect to see more autonomous trucks with the Aurora Driver on Texas roads as we engage with key logistics companies in commercial pilots.

Starting in Texas

How Aurora created the next-generation self-driving truck in 12 weeks flat | Aurora

Sterling Anderson — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Aurora Debuts FirstLight Lidar | Aurora

the Aurora Team — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 04:00:00 GMT