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A new autonomous truck, made by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle technology developed by Aurora Innovation, could be on public roads as early as this summer.
The Volvo VNL autonomous truck, which was unveiled at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, is the product of a partnership between Aurora and Volvo Automobiles. Aurora plans to begin transporting cargo using these autonomous Volvo trucks in the coming months. The trucks will be in autonomous mode and will still have a human safety operator behind the wheel to take control if necessary.
Later this year, the company plans to announce pilot programs with customers who will use the Volvo VNL autonomous truck, according to an Aurora spokesperson. Volvo has already begun manufacturing an initial test fleet of these autonomous trucks at its New River Valley assembly facility in Virginia.
The introduction of the Volvo VNL autonomous truck comes as Aurora continues to move toward its stated goal of commercializing autonomous trucks by the end of 2024. Initially, the company plans to transport cargo between Dallas and Houston using up to 20 driverless Class 8 trucks. This time without any human being at the wheel. Aurora declined to share whether trucks made by Volvo, or its other partner Paccar, would be in that inaugural driverless fleet.
Getting to commercialization is existential for Aurora, one of the last autonomous transportation companies standing. Last year, Waymo Via put the brakes on its self-driving truck program, and TuSimple recently exited the U.S. market to expand in Asia. Aurora has also not been immune to the high capital costs involved in developing and then launching autonomous commercial trucks. In January, the company laid off 3% of its workforce to cut costs ahead of its commercial launch.
Consolidation in the industry has meant fewer rivals for Aurora. Einride, Torc and Kodiak Robotics, which revealed its own purpose-built autonomous large truck, are among the few remaining.
The partnership with Volvo, which both companies first signed in March 2021, is one part of Aurora's go-to-market strategy. Aurora has launched pilot programs with logistics companies FedEx, Ryder, Schneider and Uber Freight. In January, Aurora and auto supplier Continental closed the first phase of a deal in a project of more than 300 million dollars to mass produce autonomous vehicle hardware for self-driving commercial trucks. The two companies finalized the design and system architecture for an AV (Autonomous Vehicles) hardware kit, as well as the blueprint for a secondary computer that can take over operations if an error occurs. Continental's hardware kit won't be on Aurora vans until 2027, but the Volvo VNL will still be equipped with safety features, the company says.
According to Aurora, the Volvo truck features redundant systems for steering, braking, communication, computing, energy management, energy storage and vehicle motion management. The truck is also integrated with the so-called Aurora Driver, an autonomous driving system that includes dual computers, self-driving software, internal lidar that can detect objects more than 1,300 feet away, high-resolution cameras and imaging radar.
Un lidar o deal (acronym for English LiDAR, Light Detection and Ranging or Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging) is a device that allows determining the distance from a laser emitter to an object or surface. The distance to the object is determined by measuring the delay time between the emission of the pulse and its detection through the reflected signal.
“Our platform engineering approach prioritizes safety by incorporating high-safety redundancy systems designed to mitigate potential emergency situations,” Shahrukh Kazmi, product director at Volvo Autonomous Solutions, said in a statement. “We built the autonomous Volvo VNL from the ground up, integrating these redundant systems to ensure that each safety-critical component is intentionally duplicated, thereby significantly improving both safety and reliability.”
Once Aurora and Volvo have validated this platform, the plan is to begin fully driverless operations with a “modest-sized fleet of trucks,” according to the Aurora spokesperson, who declined to provide a specific timeline. The spokesperson said that in the coming years, Aurora and Volvo hope to start high-volume production of the Volvo VNL integrated with Aurora Driver.
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