Continental and Aurora Innovation have announced a significant milestone in their partnership to develop and produce autonomous trucks on a large scale. The companies have finalized the design and architecture of the Aurora Driver, a Level 4 autonomous driving system, with plans to begin production in 2027. This achievement comes less than a year after the start of their collaboration, which aimed to facilitate the mass manufacturing of autonomous trucking systems.
The partnership between Aurora and Continental aims to create reliable, serviceable, and cost-efficient hardware kits for autonomous trucks. These kits will be designed for mass production and will enable Aurora to deploy autonomous trucks extensively after their initial launch in 2024. The companies expect the Aurora Driver to be capable of delivering customer value for over one million miles.
According to Philipp von Hirschheydt, an executive board member at Continental, autonomous mobility technologies represent a monumental opportunity to revolutionize driving behavior. He believes that achieving this milestone will put Continental on a credible path to providing easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that meet customer demands.
In addition to the hardware design, Aurora and Continental are also developing an industrialized fallback system that will go into production in 2027. This system will ensure the safe operation of autonomous vehicles by providing backups in case of component or sensor failures. By implementing a dual engineering approach, the companies aim to reduce the potential for single points of failure in both the main and fallback systems.
To bring this groundbreaking technology to market at scale, Aurora and Continental are collaborating with other partners to create a strong ecosystem. This partnership roadmap includes various stages, such as blueprint and design, build and test, finalization and integration, and ultimately, the deployment of thousands of autonomous trucks for freight transportation across the United States.
With Continental’s commitment to industrialize autonomous hardware kits, the company is well-positioned to capitalize on this groundbreaking technology with Aurora. The collaboration strives to lead the industry in autonomous trucking and bring reliable, cost-effective, and serviceable autonomous vehicles to the market.
The source of the article is from the blog tvbzorg.com