This week, Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation, Inc. announced key milestones in its efforts to launch a commercial truck product, indicating how it will deliver its Aurora Driver to logistics customers.

It is expanding its network of terminals to haul freight across the U.S. with its Driver. Adding to its South Dallas terminal opened in the summer of 2021, the company is operating three new Texas terminals in Houston, Fort Worth, and El Paso to support multiple commercial carriers for hauling freight.

Aurora is adding a commercial pilot with carrier Werner Enterprises to autonomously haul freight between the new terminals in Fort Worth and El Paso for a more than 600-mi (970-km) route. This is the third Texas pilot, with the others hauling freight for FedEx and Uber Freight.

Werner is a full-truckload carrier, meaning the company has more dedicated hauls on typically longer routes. This makes the experience valuable in refining the Aurora Driver for longer hauls. FedEx is a less-than-truckload carrier and Uber Freight is a digital brokerage, showing the diversity of Aurora’s partnerships.

Kendra Phillips, former CTO at Ryder, joins Aurora as VP of Logistics Partner Programs & Operations. She will help create Aurora’s terminal service blueprint and build out the Aurora Shield roadside assistance program, which includes maintenance and command center operations to optimize the uptime of Aurora Driver-powered trucks.

These milestones come just after Aurora released the second version of its Driver, with Beta 2.0 unlocking advanced autonomy capabilities for autonomous Class 8 trucks and ride-hailing fleets. In March, Aurora also unveiled its latest test fleet that will serve as the backbone for the Connect autonomous ride-hailing product.

 

Werner commercial pilot

The Werner commercial pilot is aimed at testing and safely deploying autonomous trucks on one of the most commercially active stretches of highway in the U.S. This week, Aurora Driver-powered trucks are hauling loads between Fort Worth and El Paso on behalf of Werner. This represents the middle leg of one of the busiest commercial lanes for Werner and the U.S. trucking industry from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

The collaboration strategically broadens Aurora’s customer ecosystem to include multiple carrier types. The pilot is designed to advance the Aurora Driver and Aurora Horizon, the company’s autonomous truck product to develop a more robust service for carriers.

Operators are accompanying each truck in the pilot fleet on weekly hauls, ready to assist if necessary. Over the next several months, the partners expect to increase the frequency of loads and are exploring further autonomy for vehicles in this lane.

The long-distance, monotonous Fort Worth-to-El Paso lane, at over 600 mi and 9 h to complete, has a reputation for being unappealing for truck drivers. By deploying the Aurora Driver on such hauls, Aurora and its customers are working to build autonomous trucks to handle less popular routes so human drivers can focus on hauling over more convenient and desirable hauls—helping to address challenges with human-driver shortages.

“This collaboration and pilot with Aurora is another step forward in our commitment to sustainability and safety for our drivers, customers, and the motoring public through innovation,” said Werner’s Chairman, President, and CEO Derek Leathers. “We look forward to building a hybrid world where drivers continue to haul freight while autonomous trucks supplement rising demand.”

The new commercial pilot is a milestone for Aurora, which brought two new terminal sites online to service this route and built the infrastructure required to operate it. The company believes that the technical, operational, and commercial experience it is building will serve its customers well as they deploy Aurora-Driver-powered trucks at scale.

“We look forward to maturing and streamlining these hybrid operations and ultimately delivering a product that delivers value to Werner and its customers at a large scale,” said Sterling Anderson, Aurora’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer.

 

One Driver for trucks and ride-hailing

The Driver Beta 2.0 product release announced in late March is the first version of Aurora’s integrated hardware and autonomy system that can power its next-generation truck fleet and the recently unveiled Toyota Sienna test fleet.

It also debuts new capabilities and critical improvements to prepare the Aurora Driver for commercial launch. The new system unlocks more challenging highway and suburban road capabilities, allowing it to safely and reliably operate on longer commercial routes.

These include navigating complicated construction zones that require changing lanes and nudging (shifting its path) by concrete barriers and/or cones. The system can better identify and react naturally to temporary speed-limit and lane-closure signs, construction workers and vehicles, trucks hauling oversized oil equipment, and other unique vehicles and road users commonly present on long-haul trucking routes. It can now perform Texas U-turns, a road configuration commonly near highways and an essential maneuver for terminal-to-terminal operation.

The release also features more mature driving capabilities released in Beta 1.0 such as unprotected left turns, high-speed merges, and lane changes.

Beta 2.0 features a higher resolution camera suite giving four times more camera data to ingest and see the same level of detail at two times the distance. Combined with Aurora’s FirstLight lidar and imaging radar, the high-resolution, long-range cameras allow the Driver to perceive and react to distant objects like road debris, vehicles on the shoulder, and construction zones for safer highway operation.

The new release includes several advances that enhance its ability to operate on long-haul routes like Fort Worth to El Paso. As Driver-powered vehicles navigate commercial routes, Aurora’s Atlas HD mapping system updates in hours to reflect new construction, fresh lane markings, and vegetation.

The Driver 2.0 is the first version powering the Aurora Horizon for trucking and Aurora Connect for ride-hailing. The common core of technology enables the intelligence and learnings from its trucks to easily adapt to its minivans.

“Aurora Driver Beta 2.0 represents an incremental yet critical milestone in our path to launching an end-to-end autonomous product that can safely move both freight and people,” said Chris Urmson, Aurora CEO and Co-Founder. “Whether we’re hauling goods for FedEx or preparing to take passengers to the airport, we’re seeing our technology evolve into a valuable product, and that’s exciting.”

 

Toyota Sienna-based ride-hailing test fleet

In March, Aurora also unveiled its latest ride-hailing test fleet of Toyota Sienna vehicles featuring Toyota’s Vehicle Control Interface (VCI) and Sienna Autono-MaaS (S-AM) platform, the latter serving as the backbone for the Aurora Connect autonomous ride-hailing product.

The company worked with Toyota Motor North America’s engineering team over the last year to establish and refine requirements to prepare the vehicle platform to integrate with its Driver. Since unveiling its prototype last fall, Aurora further refined its Driver hardware while Toyota built a larger fleet customized for the requirements of its customers including Aurora.

Aurora is autonomously testing the fleet on highways and suburban streets in Texas, where the Driver regularly handles Texas U-turns, high-speed merges, lane changes, and avoids vehicles on the shoulder. The system is also able to react to various forms of construction, stop-and-go traffic, and inclement weather, and can detect pedestrians, motorcyclists, and traffic lights.

In honor of the milestone, Toyota executives were picked up at the company’s headquarters in Plano, TX, and driven autonomously on a portion of the route that would normally be taken to the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The route showcases Aurora’s ability to safely operate at highway speeds, which allows it to prioritize popular and lucrative rides like trips to the airport when it launches Connect.

“We congratulate Aurora on reaching their milestone of integrating its Aurora Driver technology onto our Toyota Autono-MaaS platform vehicle,” said Ted Ogawa, President and CEO of Toyota Motor North America. “The route represented what we would expect going to the airport in the future…”

Thanks to Aurora’s investment in a common core of technology, the fleet of modified Toyota Siennas achieved “parity” with Aurora’s trucks with just six weeks of on-road testing. The AV tech company plans to continue adding vehicles to the fleet and testing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in preparation for a commercial ride-hailing launch.

“We’ve designed and delivered a purpose-built test fleet specifically for a ride-hailing experience that’s comfortable, convenient, and safe, and we look forward to sharing more on our progress soon,” added Anderson.