Pittsburgh-based Aurora Innovation, an autonomous freight solutions company, and Germany-based Continental AG, a technologies and services company, recently announced they have finalized the design and architecture of the future fallback system and hardware of the Aurora Driver, an SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Level 4 autonomous driving system.
A fallback system, a specialized secondary computer that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary system, is a built-in redundancy on autonomous vehicles so they can operate safely without a human driver.
“From day one, we knew we’d need to build a strong ecosystem of partners to bring this technology to market safely and at a commercial scale,” Chris Urmson, Aurora co-founder and CEO, said. “Finalizing the design of our future hardware is a meaningful step toward making the unit economics of the Aurora Driver compelling and building a business for the long-term.”
The companies entered their partnership less than a year ago with the goal of manufacturing autonomous trucking systems at a high volume. Continental plans to begin production of the Aurora Driver in 2027.
The companies teamed up to jointly developed reliable, serviceable, cost-efficient autonomous hardware kits for mass production. The future Aurora Driver will be designed to work for 1 million miles.