Autonomous Semis Set To Hit The Road Soon, Change Freight Industry Forever

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Aurora and Continental have finalized the design of the “world’s first scalable autonomous trucking system.” It’s slated to go into production in 2027 and change how companies transport goods.

The Level 4 autonomous driving system will be built by Continental as the partnership is designed to leverage the company’s development and manufacturing expertise. This has helped the firms to finalize the hardware of the Aurora Driver as well as the design and architecture of the fallback system in a relatively short period of time.

Speaking of the fallback system, it’s designed to allow autonomous semis to operate safely without a human driver. As the name suggests, it’s a “specialized secondary computer that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary system.” It should greatly improve safety as even if something goes wrong, there’s a backup in place.

More: Aurora To Start Autonomous Hauling In Texas Next Year

Besides announcing the blueprint and design phase has been completed, Aurora and Continental laid out their future roadmap. 2024 and 2025 will see the companies focused on building and testing initial versions of the hardware. As part of this effort, an “initial driverless launch” is slated for late this year.

2026 and 2027 will be when things really come together as “Continental will industrialize and validate the future Aurora Driver hardware and fallback system.” The supplier said they’ll leverage their automotive product lineup, which includes computers, sensors, telematics units, and automated driving control units – among other things.

Once everything is ready, “the hardware and fallback system will be shipped to Aurora’s trucking manufacturing partners for integration into autonomous-ready vehicles.” The companies will then focus on deploying the technology at scale as they want thousands of trucks “ready to autonomously haul freight across the U.S.”