Aurora Innovation has announced it will have its first fully-automated semi-trailer trucks on the road in 2024 with an initial route between Dallas and Houston, Texas.
The self-driving company, Aurora Innovation, was founded by Chris Urmson, who was an original engineer on the Google Self-Driving Car Project that became Waymo. The new autonomous service is named Aurora Horizon.
According to Aurora, it will establish terminals at each endpoint (at Dallas and Houston) where a trailer can be delivered and picked up by a human driver for transport to a final destination.
More than a pilot test program, Aurora said that its service is modular in scale and can and will be expanded to other locations.
As driverless trucks, the movement of goods can be done 24/7, with only downtime for refueling, loading, and maintenance. The autonomous trucks will remove the imposed human driving limits.
The company has announced that it will offer its driverless service via a subscription, and will provide customers a reliable, more predictable, and cost-efficient method of delivery than what exists with teams of human drivers.
As an example, Aurora said that a trailer could be moved from Dallas to Los Angeles in less than 24 hours.
The driverless technology on the trucks is the company’s own Aurora Driver self-driving system, a mix of hardware and software systems—an AI (artificial intelligence) that has been trained on public roads, and on virtual tests that exposed it to rare scenarios.
Aurora said that additional scenarios can be added to the system’s database to improve it.
The Aurora Driver is rated at Level 4 on the SAE scale of self-driving capability—it can drive on its own for extended periods within specific conditions, the typical one being within a geofenced area with sufficient map data.
While Level 4 is great, Aurora said its ultimate goal is Level 5 (hence the 2024 delivery date) where an autonomous truck can act in the same manner as a human in all conditions.
Autonomous vehicles have been legal on Texas highways since 2017.