Continental and Aurora Innovation have reached an important milestone in their collaboration to bring autonomous trucks to the market at scale. The two companies have completed the design and architecture of the future fallback system and hardware for the Aurora Driver, a Level 4 autonomous driving system certified by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).
By finalizing the hardware design within just one year of their partnership, Continental and Aurora have taken a significant stride toward the mass production of autonomous trucking systems. The process of bringing new hardware to market is typically lengthy and intricate, but their collaboration has paved the way for the development of reliable, serviceable, and cost-effective autonomous hardware kits for high-volume manufacturing.
This achievement sets the stage for Continental to begin production in 2027, making it the world’s first scalable autonomous trucking system. Aurora, on the other hand, will be able to deploy autonomous trucks on a large scale after their initial driverless launch in 2024, with the future Aurora Driver expected to deliver value to customers for up to one million miles.
With the aim of ensuring safety and reliability, Aurora and Continental are also working together to develop an industrialized fallback system. This backup system, projected to be available in 2027, will act as a failsafe in case any component or sensor of the primary system malfunctions. By adopting a dual engineering approach, the companies are reducing the risk of single points of failure in both the primary and fallback systems.
Philipp von Hirschheydt, Executive Board member for the Automotive Group sector at Continental, emphasized the transformative potential of autonomous mobility technologies, stating that achieving this milestone puts them on a credible path to deploying easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand.
Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO at Aurora, expressed his excitement about finalizing the design of their future hardware, as it brings them one step closer to building a compelling business for the long-term.
As the partnership between Continental and Aurora advances, the autonomous trucking industry gets closer to unlocking the economic and societal benefits of self-driving technology.
The source of the article is from the blog papodemusica.com