Aurora Innovation, Inc. announced it is acquiring Uber’s self-driving unit, the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG). The company is aiming for the addition of the ATG team and technology to accelerate its mission and delivery of its first product, the Aurora Driver. Reuters reports the acquisition values Uber at $4 billion.
“By adding the people and technology of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group to the incredible group we’ve already assembled at Aurora, we’re shifting the landscape of the automated vehicle space,” said Chris Urmson, Cofounder and CEO of Aurora. “With the addition of ATG, Aurora will have an incredibly strong team and technology, a clear path to several markets, and the resources to deliver. Simply put, Aurora will be the company best positioned to deliver the self-driving products necessary to make transportation and logistics safer, more accessible, and less expensive.”
Aurora’s leaders believe that, while ATG’s advances in software, hardware, product design, and more have flown under the radar, its team has made tremendous headway on many fronts. They cite ATG’s commitment to rigorous testing and strong safety culture, with technical prowess in both research and practical applications. Expectations are that the addition of ATG will strengthen and accelerate the first Aurora Driver applications for heavy-duty trucks, while allowing the combined company to accelerate its work on light-vehicle products.
In addition to acquiring ATG, Aurora also announced a strategic partnership with Uber that connects its technology to one of the world’s leading ride-hailing platforms and strengthens its position to deliver the Aurora Driver broadly. While Aurora’s first product will be for autonomous trucking, the Uber deal positions it to also be a leading player in passenger mobility. Uber is investing $400 million for a 26% stake in Aurora, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is joining its Board.
“Few technologies hold as much promise to improve people’s lives with safe, accessible, and environmentally friendly transportation as self-driving vehicles,” said Khosrowshahi. “For the last five years, our phenomenal team at ATG has been at the forefront of this effort… I’m looking forward to working with Chris, and to bringing the Aurora Driver to the Uber network in the years ahead.”
The Uber deal is just the latest in a series of recent moves intended to position Aurora as a leading independent autonomous vehicle technology company. It credits high-quality investors committed for the long-term as key enablers for “the financial runway to make our own choices.”
Among the investors for Aurora—founded in 2017 by Chris Urmson, CEO; Drew Bagnell, CTO; and Sterling Anderson, CPO—is Uber in addition to Amazon, Sequoia, Hyundai Motor Co., Shell Ventures, Baillie Gifford, Index Ventures, Greylock, Geodesic Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Canada Pension Plan, and Reinvent Capital.
In May, Aurora acknowledged the role of these investments in helping grow its staff to 500 people, with the goal of taking a significant chunk of the self-driving industry.
The company says the market is well on its way to being an over $2 trillion industry—far greater than what one automotive or network can commercially capture. It believes that there are many OEMs and networks—operating in middle and last-mile delivery, long-haul trucking, and ridesharing—that will want this technology. To deliver the benefits of self-driving broadly to both OEMs and network partners, Aurora is building its Aurora Driver and ecosystem to support them all.
The company believes it is especially well-positioned for its first market—delivering middle-mile, highway truck driving—because of its recently announced FirstLight LiDAR. It expects the technology to enable the Aurora Driver for trucks to have a perception system that detects and tracks objects farther, faster, and with greater precision than before.
So how does this ATG investment and LiDAR and other technologies benefit the company’s technical development? More broadly, winning in the self-driving space requires moving quickly and decisively on foundational technical investments in hardware, software, and development tools, wrote Anderson, in a recent blog post.
“Thanks to early investments in development, we were able to work at industry-breaking speed to develop our next-generation truck,” he said. “This next generation of our vehicles takes advantage of the investments we’ve made in long-range, next-generation LiDAR; a presciently-designed, vehicle-agnostic Aurora Driver hardware kit; our industry-leading virtual test suite; and the Aurora test site network. These and other tools allowed us to bring our next-generation platform to the road with industry-leading speed, even with the limitations of the pandemic.”
The Aurora team focused its development efforts in 2017 on building a robust self-driving system in complex urban settings and in 2019 on finding a way to unlock safe, high-speed operation of trucks. For the latter, the company added the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR technology through its acquisition of Blackmore.
Self-driving systems have traditionally been outfitted with AM LiDAR, which emits light pulses at a fixed frequency. In contrast, FMCW LiDAR sends out a constant stream of light, the “continuous-wave,” and changes the frequency modulates that light at regular intervals. This allows the Aurora Driver to both determine the location of objects and precisely measure their velocity using the Doppler effect.
The FMCW LiDAR sensors give significantly better range performance compared to typical AM sensors, allowing the Aurora Driver to see well beyond 300 m (984 ft) even on targets that don’t reflect much light. The sensors also operate at a 1550-nm wavelength, allowing the broadcasting of stronger light pulses while still meeting eye safety standards. FMCW doesn’t suffer from interference because each sensor is specially designed to respond only to its own light pulses. If the returning light does not match the timing, frequency, and wavelength of what was originally transmitted, the FMCW sensor knows to filter out that data point.
In the year that followed its acquisition of Blackmore, Aurora quickly integrated the engineering teams, leading to the development and launch of FirstLight Lidar—the current generation of which detects objects 400 m (1312 ft) away.
“When paired with cameras and radar, the resulting sensor suite is unmatched in the self-driving world, and essential to the safe, rapid deployment of a high-speed self-driving product,” said Anderson.
The prevailing speeds and environmental complexities present in urban, suburban, and rural/highway driving make for a fairly diverse set of hardware needs, he continued: “Self-driving hardware systems designed for low-speed urban environments will typically lack the long-range, multi-modal sensing required for high-speed highway driving. Similarly, self-driving systems designed for high-speed highway driving are often unable to accommodate more complex urban or suburban settings. Add to these the fact that different vehicles can impose different sensor perspectives, different control interfaces, and different dynamic responses, and the strong temptation for most self-driving development companies becomes to focus on just one use case and one vehicle.”
Adding to this first product in logistics, the acquisition of Uber ATG will quickly expand Aurora’s capabilities to help the company reach its goal to ultimately deliver a broadly scalable Aurora Driver self-driving system to adapt to multiple vehicles and operating environments. ATG’s focus on ridesharing means it can quickly add in its experience in challenges like rider assistance, dispatching self-driving vehicles alongside human drivers, and nuanced robotics problems such as rider pickup and dropoff.
“This foundational work and combined expertise gives Aurora an unprecedented opportunity to lead the industry in both trucking and passenger mobility,” concluded Urmson.
