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Nuro becomes first company to receive commercial autonomous vehicle permit from California DMV

December 24, 2020 Big Data

Hours after announcing that it acquired self-driving truck startup Ike, Nuro revealed it’s the first company to receive permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to charge a fee and receive compensation for its driverless delivery service. Unlike the autonomous testing licenses the California DMV previously granted to Nuro and others, which limited the compensation self-driving vehicle companies could receive, the deployment permit enables Nuro to make its technology commercially available.

Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten adoption of autonomous vehicles for delivery. Self-driving cars, vans, and trucks promise to minimize the risk of spreading disease by limiting driver contact. This is particularly true with regard to short-haul freight, which is experiencing a spike in volume during the outbreak. The producer price index for local truckload carriage jumped 20.4% from July to August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, most likely propelled by demand for short-haul distribution from warehouses and distribution centers to ecommerce fulfillment centers and stores.

The California DMV permit allows Nuro to use a fleet of light-duty driverless vehicles for a delivery service on surface streets within designated parts of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, including the cities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and Woodside. The vehicles have a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and are only approved to operate in fair weather conditions on streets with a speed limit of no more than 35 miles per hour.

“This permit will allow our vehicles to operate commercially on California roads in two counties near our [Mountain View, California] headquarters in the Bay Area. Soon we will announce our first deployment in California with an established partner. The service will start with our fleet of Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, followed by our custom-designed electric R2 vehicles,” Nuro chief legal and policy officer David Estrada wrote in a blog post. “We have extensively tested our self-driving technology and built a track record of safe operations over the past four years, including two successful commercial deployments in other states and driverless testing with R2 in the Bay Area communities where we plan to deploy.”

In April, Nuro, which has over 600 employees, secured a permit from the California DMV to test driverless delivery vehicles on public roads within a portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. That followed the issuance of a DMV permit in 2017 requiring that the company employ safety drivers in its autonomous test vehicles on public roads. More recently, in February, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) granted Nuro an autonomous vehicle exemption that allowed the company to pilot its custom-designed R2 delivery vehicles on roads without certain equipment required for passenger vehicles.

For the better part of a year, Nuro’s fleet of Toyota Prius vehicles in Houston, Texas has been making deliveries to consumers from various partners, including Kroger, Domino’s, and Walmart. The company has deployed over 75 delivery vehicles to date, a mix of self-driving Priuses and R2s.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Gatik raises $25 million for autonomous short-haul delivery trucks

November 23, 2020 Big Data

Gatik, a startup developing an autonomous vehicle stack for B2B short-haul logistics, today closed a $ 25 million series A round. The company also announced it will bring a fleet of self-driving vans to Canada as part of a deal with Loblaw, the country’s largest retailer with over 200,000 employees.

Palo Alto, California-based Gatik, which has offices in Toronto, is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon graduate and CEO Gautam Narang. He cofounded the company in 2017 with CTO Arjun Narang and chief engineer and former Ford computer vision lead Apeksha Kumavat.

Gatik’s platform taps level 4 autonomous vehicles (capable of operating with limited human input and oversight in specific conditions and locations, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers) to fulfill on-demand and scheduled deliveries up to a distance of 200 miles. Its retrofitted trucks and Ford Transit 350 vans and orchestration software, which the company has been testing on public roads in California since Q1 2018, promise to transport goods around city environments more affordably.

For Loblaw, Gatik says it will transport “multi-temperature” goods and products from the retailer’s microfulfillment centers for inventory pooling across multiple locations, multiple times a day, to retail outposts across the Greater Toronto Area beginning January 2021. The program will cover five routes that will operate 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Gatik’s fleet of Class 1-6 autonomous vehicles moves goods from microfulfilment centers and dark stores to pick-up points like retail stores, distribution centers, and offices — known as the middle mile,” Gatik head of policy and communications Richard Steiner told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “This is critical because the middle mile is the most expensive and challenging part of the supply chain for retailers to contend with. … The key to Gatik’s success involves optimizing fixed, predetermined routes, such as those used along the supply chain’s middle mile, countless times each day. The biggest threat to the autonomous revolution is the unknown, or edge cases, which are substantially reduced on fixed journeys.”

In July, Walmart revealed that it had launched a pilot with Gatik to ferry customer orders between select store locations in Bentonville, Arkansas. Gatik’s vans transport items from a warehouse to neighborhood market stores along a two-mile route (or five-mile one-way route) in Bentonville. Each van makes up to 10 runs a day during daylight, with human backup operators behind the wheel.

More recently, Gatik received a $ 100,000 grant from PlanetM, a Michigan Economic Development Corporation program that seeks to fund solutions to pandemic-driven challenges in Michigan. In collaboration with an unnamed partner, referred to as “one of the state’s largest retailers,” Gatik says its autonomous trucks will operate on predetermined, fixed routes throughout Grand Rapids and Rochester.

Gatik says it will continue to target customers such as third-party logistics providers (like FedEx, UPS, and USPS), consumer goods distributors, food and beverage distributors, medical and pharmaceutical distributors, and auto parts distributors for the foreseeable future. The company has raised a total of over $ 29 million in venture capital. Today’s round was led by Wittington Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, with participation from FM Capital, Intact Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Dynamo, Reilly Brennan’s Trucks VC, Intact Ventures, and AngelPad.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Via partners with troubled May Mobility for autonomous shuttle pilot in Arlington

November 18, 2020 Big Data

Via today announced a partnership with troubled autonomous vehicle startup May Mobility to develop a platform that integrates on-demand shared rides, public transportation, and transit options for passengers with accessibility needs. May says it will adopt Via’s autonomous fleet platform to power booking, routing, passenger and vehicle assignment and identification, customer experience, and fleet management. The longer-term strategy involves multiple public transit deployments in 2021, starting with Arlington, Texas.

By all appearances, May Mobility was a scrappy success story. But a VentureBeat investigation revealed that May engineers struggled to maintain and upgrade the company’s vehicle platform, at one point spending months attempting to install an air conditioning system in the height of summer. Leadership’s ambition often outstretched May’s ability to deliver, which upset vendors, some of whom went unpaid for stretches of time. And not a single one of the company’s commercial routes approached full autonomy.

Despite this, Via plans to forge ahead with the deal. In collaboration with the city of Arlington and supported by a $ 1.7 million U.S. Federal Transit Administration Integrated Mobility Innovation Program grant, on-demand autonomous vehicle rides from May will be incorporated into Via’s existing public transit service in the city. This service has been operational since 2017 and was extended in October 2020.

“Via is a leading provider in on-demand transit services, with a software stack to create efficient, highly-optimized on-demand autonomous vehicle solutions,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “May Mobility selected Via as a partner to support the company’s shift from a focus on fixed route AV services to on-demand, and will leverage Via’s experience and technology to further develop its suite of autonomous vehicle capabilities in a new way.”

The one-year Via and May pilot program in Arlington, called Arlington Rideshare, Automation, and Payment Integration Demonstration (RAPID), is expected to launch for the public in March 2021. The companies say it will serve downtown Arlington and the University of Texas at Arlington campus, providing students and faculty with free rides during the test phase, all integrated into Via’s app.

Beyond Arlington, Via and May plan to expand access to full-scale autonomous transit networks in 2021, in coordination and partnership with public transit systems in a number of locations across the U.S. “Via’s partnership with May Mobility will integrate flexible, autonomous vehicle fleets into public transit today and will provide insights to support cities as they transform public transit infrastructure for the future,” Via cofounder and CEO Daniel Ramot said.

May’s post-deployment road has been bumpier than most, but some of its rivals haven’t fared much better. In February, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) partially suspended U.S. operations of France’s EasyMile after a passenger in Columbus, Ohio was injured while riding in one of the company’s driverless shuttles. And in 2018, the NHTSA suspended a separate Transdev program in Florida that sought to replace school buses with EasyMile vehicles.

The Department of Transportation two years ago published a prescient report on the autonomous shuttle sector that highlighted the limited vehicle autonomy, procurement challenges, and regulatory unpredictability shuttle startups have yet to address. The industry isn’t without apparent success stories, like that of Optimus Ride. But May’s setbacks illustrate the nascent technology’s limited applicability, particularly when stretched beyond its capabilities.

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Autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai raises $267 million at an over $5.3 billion valuation

November 6, 2020 Big Data

In a sign that enthusiasm for driverless cars hasn’t waned during the pandemic, Pony.ai today announced $ 267 million in new funding. The startup has offices in Guangzhou, China and Fremont, California and has now raised over $ 1 billion at a valuation north of $ 5.3 billion (up from $ 3 billion as of February 2020).

Some experts predict the pandemic will hasten the adoption of autonomous transportation technologies. Despite needing disinfection, driverless cars can potentially minimize the risk of spreading disease. But surveys are mixed, with one from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education showing nearly three in four Americans believe autonomous cars aren’t ready for prime time. Unsurprisingly, Motional disagrees with this assertion, claiming one-fifth of respondents to its Consumer Mobility Report are “more interested” in autonomous vehicles than they were before the pandemic.

Former Baidu chief architect James Peng cofounded Pony.ai in 2016 with Tiancheng Lou, who worked at Google X’s autonomous car project before it was spun off into Waymo. The pair aims to build level 4 autonomous cars — able to operate without human oversight under select conditions, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers — for “predictable” environments, such as industrial parks, college campuses, and small towns, with a tentative deployment window of several years from now.

Pony’s full-stack hardware platform, PonyAlpha, leverages lidars, radars, and cameras to keep tabs on obstacles up to 200 meters from its self-driving cars. PonyAlpha is the foundation for the company’s fully autonomous trucks and freight delivery solution, which commenced testing in April 2019 and is deployed in test cars within the city limits of Fremont and Beijing (in addition to Guangzhou).

Pony.ai is one of the few companies to have secured an autonomous vehicle testing license in Beijing. In California, it has obtained a robo-taxi operations permit from the California Public Utilities Commission. The only other companies to have secured such a license in California are AutoX, Waymo, and Zoox.

Last October, Pony.ai partnered with Via and Hyundai to launch BotRide, Pony.ai’s second public robo-taxi service after a pilot program (PonyPilot) in Nansha, China. BotRide allowed riders and carpoolers to hail autonomous Hyundai Kona electric SUVs through apps developed with Via, sourcing from a fleet of 10 cars with human safety drivers behind the wheel.

In August, Pony.ai inked an agreement with Bosch to “explore the future of automotive maintenance and repair for autonomous fleets.” Pony.ai and Bosch’s Automotive Aftermarket division in North America plan to develop and test fleet maintenance solutions for commercial robo-taxi programs. Pony.ai says it began piloting a maintenance program with Bosch in the San Francisco Bay Area in early July.

Among other potential advantages, autonomous driving promises the continuous operation of fleets and reduction of downtime. According to a 2017 McKinsey report, robo-taxis could reduce a fleet operator’s total cost of ownership by 30% to 50% compared with private-vehicle ownership and by about 70% compared to shared mobility, significantly disrupting the market. But robo-taxis will need vastly different maintenance infrastructure than cars, in part because they might lack regular monitoring; have only minutes between passengers; and sport expensive, sensitive, and unconventional parts like lidar sensors.

Pony.ai has competition in Daimler, which in summer 2018 obtained a permit from the Chinese government that allows it to test self-driving cars powered by Baidu’s Apollo platform on public roads in Beijing. And startup Optimus Ride built out a small driverless shuttle fleet in Brooklyn. Waymo, which has racked up more than 20 million real-world miles in over 25 cities across the U.S. and billions of simulated miles, in November 2018 became the first company to obtain a driverless car testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Rivals include Tesla, Aptiv, May Mobility, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Pronto.ai, and Nuro.

Fortunately for Pony.ai, it has partnerships with Chinese state-owned auto group FAW and GAC Group (a Guangzhou-based automobile maker) to develop level 4 robo-taxi vehicles. It also has a joint collaboration with On Semiconductor to prototype image sensing and processing technologies for machine vision. And Pony.ai has driven over 1.5 million autonomous kilometers (or about 932,056 miles) as of year-end 2019, putting it within striking distance of Yandex (2 million miles) and Baidu (1.8 million miles).

Previous and existing investors in Pony.ai include video game publisher Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Legend Capital. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board’s Teachers’ Innovation Platform led this latest round, with participation from Fidelity China Special Situations PLC, 5Y Capital, ClearVue Partners, Eight Roads, and others.

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U.S. NHTSA’s autonomous vehicle test tracking tool is light on data

September 3, 2020 Big Data

In June, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) detailed the Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing (AV TEST), a program that purports to provide a robust source of information about autonomous vehicle testing. Today marked the official launch of AV TEST after several months of ramp-up, beginning with a tool for tracking driverless pilots in 17 cities across nine states. But despite lofty promises from the NHTSA of the transparency AV TEST will herald, its current incarnation — at least from first impressions — is bare-bones at best.

Companies including Beep, Cruise, Fiat Chrysler, Nuro, Toyota, Uber, Local Motors, Navya, and Waymo have agreed to participate in AV TEST so far, along with those that have previously submitted testing information to NHTSA, including Aurora, Easymile, Kodiak Robotics, Lyft, TuSimple, Nvidia, and Zoox. The tracking tool reveals on-road testing locations and activity data like vehicle types, uses, dates, frequency, vehicle counts, and routes. And it shows information about state vehicle operation regulations, emergency response plans, and legislation, as well as links to the voluntary safety reports some vehicle operators publish.

The ostensible goal is to shed light on the breadth of vehicle testing taking place across the country. Owing to a lack of public data around autonomous vehicles, Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) reports a majority of Americans don’t think the technology is “ready for primetime.” The federal government maintains no database of autonomous vehicle reliability records, and while states like California mandate that companies testing driverless cars disclose how often humans are forced to take control of the vehicles, critics assert those are imperfect measures of safety.

“The more information the public has about the on-road testing of automated driving systems, the more they will understand the development of this promising technology,” NHTSA deputy administrator James Owens said during a web briefing. “Automated driving systems are not yet available for sale to the public, and the AV TEST Initiative will help improve public understanding of the technology’s potential and limitations as it continues to develop.”

U.S. NHTSA’s autonomous vehicle test tracking tool is light on data

Above: A screenshot of the AV TEST tracking tool.

Some of the AV TEST tool’s stats are admittedly eye-catching, like the fact that program participants are reportedly conducting 34 shuttle, 24 autonomous car, and 7 delivery robot trials in the U.S. But they aren’t especially informative. Several pilots don’t list the road type (e.g., “street,” “parking lot,” “freeway,”) where testing is taking place, and the entries for locations tend to be light on the details. Waymo reports it is conducting “Rain Testing” in Florida, for instance, but hasn’t specified the number and models of vehicles involved. Cruise is more forthcoming about its tests in San Francisco, but only approximates the number of vehicles in its fleets.

The incompleteness of the data aside, participation in AV TEST appears to be uneven at launch. Major stakeholders like Pony.ai, Baidu, Tesla, Argo.AI, Amazon, Postmates, and Motion seemingly declined to provide data for the purposes of the tracking tool or have yet to make a decision either way. The net effect is a database that’s less useful than it might otherwise be; while the AV TEST tool reports that there are 61 pilots currently active, the actual number is likely to be far greater.

It also remains to be seen how diligently NHTSA will maintain this database. Absent a vetting process, companies have wiggle room to underreport or misrepresent tests taking place. And because the AV TEST program is voluntary, there’s nothing to prevent participating states and companies from demurring as testing resumes during and after the pandemic.

“Unfortunately, NHTSA’s reliance on voluntary industry actions to accomplish this is a recipe for disaster,” Advocates for Highway Safety president Cathy Chase said of the AV TEST program earlier this summer. “It has been reported that at least 80 companies are testing autonomous vehicles. Yet, only 20 have submitted safety assessments to the U.S. DOT under the current voluntary guidelines, iterations of which have been in place for nearly four years … Additionally, over that time, the National Transportation Safety Board has investigated six crashes involving vehicles with autonomous capabilities uncovering serious problems, including inadequate countermeasures to ensure driver engagement, reliance on voluntary reporting, lack of standards, poor corporate safety culture, and a misguided oversight approach by NHTSA.”

Tellingly, the AV TEST program’s launch comes as federal efforts to regulate autonomous vehicles remain stalled. The DOT’s recently announced Automated Vehicles 4.0 (AV 4.0) guidelines request — but don’t mandate — regular assessments of self-driving vehicle safety, and they permit those assessments to be completed by automakers themselves rather than by standards bodies. (Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety also criticized AV 4.0 for its vagueness.) And while the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would create a regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles, dubbed the SELF DRIVE Act, it has yet to be taken up by the Senate. In fact, the Senate two years ago tabled a separate bill (the AV START Act) that made its way through committee in November 2017.

All of this raises the question of whether the AV TEST program will be able to move the needle on autonomous car safety. Time will tell, but today’s rollout doesn’t instill confidence.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit

August 27, 2020 Big Data

Bosch, Ford, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate firm Bedrock today detailed an autonomous parking pilot scheduled to launch in September at The Assembly, a mixed-used building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Leveraging Bosch sensors that monitor driving corridors and their surroundings to guide vehicles to and from assigned spaces, Ford plans to demo how cars like the 2020 Escape can self-drive to parking spaces without human drivers onboard.

The companies have no intention of extending the demo beyond the end of September, but they say they hope to gain “valuable insights” that will help expand the technology in the future. For instance, they claim the system could allow existing garages to accommodate up to 20% more vehicles because developers don’t have to leave space for drivers and passengers to open car doors in parking spots.

The autonomous parking valet — which the companies claim is the first of its kind in the U.S. — leans on a range of intelligent infrastructure supplied by Bosch, including lidar sensors and a dedicated server. Complementary in-car Ford technology converts commands from the server into maneuvers, enabling cars to drive themselves up and down ramps and spot potential hazards (including pedestrians).

Upon arriving at the garage, drivers will leave the test vehicle in a designated area and use an app to send it into an automated parking routine. They will use that same app to request the return of the vehicle to a designated retrieval zone.

Bosch and Ford will test autonomous parking in Detroit

Above: A Ford test vehicle autonomously backs into a parking space.

The system’s reliance on sensors makes it potentially less capable than, say, Tesla’s Enhanced Summon, which navigates cars autonomously through virtually any parking lot. But Enhanced Summon doesn’t support multi-story garages, and it can’t currently park vehicles autonomously — only retrieve them. By contrast, Bosch and Ford say their platform can be deployed via retrofitted solutions or with embedded infrastructure planned into the construction of new garages.

The pilot’s launch follows the rollout of Bosch and Daimler’s smartphone-controlled automated valet in the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart, which gained regulatory approval in July 2019 following an assessment by German certification authority TÜV Rheinland. That setup is identical to the one in Detroit; Bosch and Daimler began developing fully automated driverless parking in 2015, and in 2017, their pilot in the Stuttgart garage became capable of automated parking in real conditions. A year later, the two companies began allowing Mercedes-Benz Museum visitors to use the parking service live, accompanied by trained safety personnel.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

TuSimple plans autonomous truck network backed by UPS

July 1, 2020 Big Data

Ahead of the commercial rollout of its driverless trucks by 2024, TuSimple today outlined the launch of what it’s calling the world’s first autonomous freight network. In partnership with UPS, Penske, U.S. Xpress, and McLane Company, the company plans to establish an “ecosystem” of autonomous trucks complemented by digitally mapped routes, strategically placed terminals, and a monitoring system dubbed TuSimple Connect.

TuSimple says it believes the autonomous freight network is the “safest” and “most efficient” way to bring self-driving trucks to market. As the pandemic drives unprecedented growth in the logistics and ground transportation market, Aurora, Waymo, and other rivals are investing increased resources in fully autonomous solutions.

TuSimple’s autonomous freight network will roll out in three phases. During the first — spanning this year to 2021 — TuSimple will offer delivery service between the cities of Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The second phase, which will begin in 2022 and end in 2023, will see an expansion in shipping from Los Angeles to Jacksonville that will connect the East with the West Coast. The third phase, starting in 2023, will grow TuSimple’s driverless operations nationwide, adding routes in 48 states and allowing customers to use TuSimple-equipped trucks on the freight network (with priority given to existing customers and companies with large orders).

Similar deployments in Europe and Asia will follow if all goes well, building upon TuSimple’s delivery pilot in Shanghai. There, as here, businesses will pay TuSimple to haul goods on their behalf.

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TuSimple already operates autonomously on seven different routes between Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Dallas, and it intends to open a shipping terminal in Dallas in alignment with its freight network plans. For high-volume customers, TuSimple tells VentureBeat it will continue to map routes and deliver to distribution centers. And it says it will give clients of all sizes the ability to track freight in real time using TuSimple Connect.

To accelerate the network’s growth, TuSimple completed a series of 22-hour self-driving truck runs along the I-10, I-20, and I-30 corridors through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Leading up to today, the company was completing 50 commercial runs per week, and it now plans to conduct 93 commercial runs per week in the U.S., using 40 trucks.

Penske, which operates more than 750 service facilities throughout North America, has agreed to scale TuSimple’s fleet operations and provide maintenance and over-the-road service. U.S. Xpress and UPS will give TuSimple runs to haul for them, guiding which routes open next and enabling the company to further refine its autonomous technology.

TuSimple — which is reportedly seeking $ 250 million in new funding — is proposing an ambitious timeline, but it’s arguably better-positioned than most to deliver. The company recently expanded a freight-hauling pilot program with UPS to 20 trips per week, with additional routes between Arizona and Texas and El Paso and Dallas, and its trucks are performing revenue-generating trips for over a dozen customers, including Fortune 100 companies and “household names.” Moreover, TuSimple has R&D and testing centers globally in hotspots like Beijing, San Diego, Shanghai, and Tucson. It also has a war chest totaling over $ 298 million, with contributions from Sina, Nvidia, UPS, and Mando.

On the other hand, analysts like Boston Consulting Group’s Brian Collie now believe broad commercialization of autonomous cars won’t happen before 2025 or 2026, at least three years later than originally anticipated. Partly as a consequence of halted real-world vehicle testing, the coronavirus has delayed Lyft rival Waymo’s work by at least two months. Meanwhile, Ford pushed the launch of its driverless vehicle service from 2021 to 2022.

TuSimple’s Class 8 semi-trucks can carry loads exceeding 33,000 pounds and are level 4 under the guidelines penned by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), meaning they’re capable of full autonomy in controlled (and often geofenced) highways and local streets. Unlike self-driving perception platforms from the likes of Uber and Waymo, TuSimple’s is decidedly camera-forward. Using an eight-camera array and other sensors, it can detect cars, pedestrians, and other obstacles up to 1,000 meters away.

TuSimple says its approach enables it to achieve three-centimeter precision for truck positioning, even in inclement weather and at night, and it allows for plenty of leeway in real-time decision-making. It also claims better efficiency than its competitors. TuSimple says its trucks are able to monitor traffic flow far ahead to maintain a given speed more consistently than human drivers and competing autonomous vehicle systems. The company claims this reduces fuel consumption by as much as 15% and average purchased transportation costs by 30%.

TuSimple has plenty in the way of competition, like Thor Trucks and Pronto.ai. There’s also Ike, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Apple, Google, and Uber Advanced Technologies Group engineers that has raised $ 52 million. And then there’s venture-backed Swedish driverless car company Einride. Meanwhile, Paz Eshel and former Uber and Otto engineer Don Burnette recently secured $ 40 million for their startup, Kodiak Robotics. That’s not to mention Embark, which integrates its self-driving systems into Peterbilt semis and launched a pilot with Amazon to haul cargo, or driverless truck solutions from incumbents like Daimler and Volvo.

But demand for driverless trucks is strong. The industry stands to save the logistics and shipping industry $ 70 billion annually while boosting productivity by 30%. According to a recent study from the Consumer Technology Association, a quarter (26%) of consumers now view autonomous delivery technologies more favorably than before the health crisis. Besides cost savings, the growth is driven in part by a shortage of human drivers. In 2018, the American Trucking Associates estimated that 50,000 more truckers were needed to close the gap in the U.S., even despite the sidelining of proposed U.S. Transportation Department screenings for sleep apnea.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Waymo to expand autonomous truck testing in the American Southwest

June 30, 2020 Big Data

Today during a briefing with members of the media, Waymo head of commercialization for trucking Charlie Jatt outlined the company’s go-to-market plans for Waymo Via, its self-driving delivery division. In the future, Waymo will partner with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to equip cloud-based trucks manufactured and sold to the market with its autonomous systems. In addition, Waymo will work with fleets to provide its software services and offer support for things like mapping and remote fleet assistance.

As Waymo transitions to this model, Jatt said that Waymo intends to own and offer its own fleet of trucks — at least in the short term. One of the delivery solutions it’s exploring is a transfer-hub model where, rather than an automated truck covering an entire journey, it’ll be a mix of an automated portion and a portion involving manually driven, human-manned trucks. Automated vehicle transfer hubs close to highways would handle the switch-off and minimize surface street driving.

In a first step toward this vision, Waymo says it’ll soon expand testing on roads in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas along the I-10 corridor between Phoenix and Tuscon, as previously announced. It this year mapped routes between Phoenix, El Paso, Dallas, and Houston and ramped up testing in California on freeways in Mountain View, but the focus in 2020 will be on the American Southwest.

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Tests will be primarily along Interstates 10, 20, and 45 and through metropolitan areas like El Paso, Dallas, and Houston. Chrysler Pacifica vans retrofitted with Waymo’s technology stack will map roads ahead of driverless Peterbilt trucks as part of a project known as Husky.

Waymo is also engaged with local delivery under the Waymo Via umbrella, the company reiterated. It currently has two partnerships in the Phoenix area — one with AutoNation and one with UPS. On the AutoNation side, Waymo is performing “hot shot” deliveries where Waymo vehicles travel to certain AutoNation locations and deliver car parts. And on the UPS side, the company is ferrying packages from stores to UPS sorting centers.

Waymo began piloting dedicated goods delivery with class A trucks — 18-wheelers — in 2017. After completing tests in 2018 with real loads from Google datacenters in Atlanta, Waymo began limited testing on roads in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, and on Metro Phoenix freeways.

Waymo’s autonomous trucks employ a combination of lidars, radars, and cameras to understand the world around them. They have roughly twice as many sensors as Waymo’s cars to handle the trucks’ unique shape and the occlusions they cause, and they place a greater emphasis on long-length perception (the perception range is somewhere beyond 300 meters). But they use the same compute platform found in the fifth-generation Waymo Driver.

As the pandemic drives unprecedented growth in the logistics and ground transportation market, Aurora, TuSimple, and other rivals are investing increased resources in fully autonomous solutions. They stand to save the logistics and shipping industry $ 70 billion annually while boosting productivity by 30%; according to a recent study from the Consumer Technology Association, a quarter (26%) of consumers now view autonomous delivery technologies more favorably than before the health crisis.

Besides cost savings, the growth in autonomous trucking has been driven in part by a shortage of human drivers. In 2018, the American Trucking Associates estimated that 50,000 more truckers were needed to close the gap in the U.S., even despite the sidelining of proposed U.S. Transportation Department screenings for sleep apnea.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Amazon acquires autonomous vehicle startup Zoox

June 28, 2020 Big Data

Amazon today announced it is acquiring Zoox, a startup developing autonomous vehicle systems aimed at ride-hailing applications. Neither company disclosed terms of the deal, but according to the Information and the Financial Times, the purchase price is over $ 1.2 billion.

It’s Amazon’s biggest bet yet on autonomous technologies — whether vehicular, aeronautic, or industrial. Last February, Amazon contributed to driverless car and truck startup Aurora’s $ 530 million series B round. In March 2012, Amazon acquired warehouse robotics startup Kiva Systems for $ 775 million.

With Zoox, Amazon — which delivers more than 10 billion items worldwide each year — is looking to cut costs. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate self-driving technology could save the tech giant over $ 20 billion a year on shipping as it becomes a formidable competitor to companies like UPS, DHL, and FedEx. By 2023, Amazon is expected to spend $ 90 billion on logistics, expanding its truck trailer, ocean freighter, last-mile delivery van, and cargo jet networks.

“Zoox is working to imagine, invent, and design a world-class autonomous ride-hailing experience,” said Amazon global consumer CEO Jeff Wilke in a statement. “Like Amazon, Zoox is passionate about innovation and about its customers, and we’re excited to help the talented Zoox team to bring their vision to reality in the years ahead.”

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The story so far

Zoox was founded in 2014 by Australian artist-designer Tim Kentley Klay and Jesse Levinson, son of Apple chair Arthur D. Levinson, who was developing self-driving technology at Stanford. In December 2018, Zoox was first to gain approval to provide driverless transport services to the public in California. And in January 2019, the company appointed former Intel chief strategy officer Aicha Evans CEO, signaling a shift in priorities from conceptualization to commercialization.

Foster City, California-based Zoox had raised over $ 990 million in venture capital at a multibillion-dollar valuation, and it appeared to be making progress toward a commercial launch before live testing of its level 3 vehicles ground to a halt during the pandemic. The company recently announced it would begin deploying its autonomous Highlanders in Las Vegas. It has a permit from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to transport passengers autonomously and has submitted documents to the California DMV showing its 58 vehicles drove 67,015 autonomous miles in 2019 in San Francisco.

Zoox had hoped to move beyond retrofitted Highlanders to fully custom cars that could be summoned by customers via a smartphone app. The roughly BMW i3-sized electric vehicles would have used cameras and four lidar sensors for perception, with each one covering 270 degrees. The vehicles were also designed with four-wheel steering, active four-wheel suspension, dual power trains, and dual batteries with a combined capacity larger than that of most single-car batteries today.

The idea was to reduce congestion through fleet management and to minimize trips back to base stations for charging overnight. Zoox’s shuttle-like car — which was fully driverless — was designed to operate in a shared fleet in order to maximize efficiency and cut down on ride trip times.

The focus on efficiency likely appealed to Amazon’s newfound conservationist sensibilities. In February 2019, Amazon led a $ 700 million funding round in Rivian, a Michigan-based startup developing electric pickup trucks, which Amazon claims will save an estimated 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030. Amazon plans to have 10,000 of Rivian’s vehicles making on-the-road deliveries as early as 2022 and 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2040.

Plans

According to Amazon, Zoox founders Evans (CEO) and Levinson (CTO) will continue to lead Zoox as a standalone business, and Amazon will help “bring their vision of autonomous ride-hailing to reality.” Amazon gave little away in terms of how it will leverage the technology. It could convert Zoox’s planned robo-taxis into automated delivery vans further down the road, a task it certainly has the expertise to pull off. According to Reuters, Amazon holds more than 210 transportation-related patents, including a 2017 patent to provide on-demand transportation services through a network of autonomous vehicles.

Zoox previously said it was demonstrating its vehicle to partners and insiders behind closed doors, but the next phase of its deployment plans remain unclear. A few months ago, Zoox reportedly laid off 10% of its 1,000-person workforce days after letting go of 120 contract workers, moves it blamed on the economic fallout from the pandemic. It also said it would pay Tesla an undisclosed amount of monetary damages and undergo an audit to settle a trade secret theft lawsuit filed last year in which Tesla claimed some former employees brought proprietary information to Zoox.

According to the Information, a majority of Zoox investors — among them Lux Capital, DFJ, Primavera Capital, and Atlassian cofounder Michael Cannon-Brooks’ Grok Ventures — will see a return from the purchase. Still, the reported $ 1 billion price tag supports the notion that autonomous vehicle development remains expensive. Ford and Volkswagen partner Argo AI recently closed a $ 2.6 billion round at a $ 7.25 billion valuation. In May, Didi Chuxing’s self-driving unit nabbed $ 500 million, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. And in March, Waymo managed to secure a $ 750 million extension, bringing its first external round to $ 3 billion.

The race has taken on greater urgency as the pandemic roils the economy. While startups like Gatik, Optimus Ride, TuSimple, and Nuro have escaped the worst of it so far, well-financed ventures — including Cruise, Kodiak Robotics, and Ike — have shed hundreds of employees collectively.

Analysts predict the health crisis and its effects will result in consolidation, tabled or canceled launches, and shakeups across the autonomous transportation industry. In something of a case in point, Ford pushed the unveiling of its self-driving service from 2021 to 2022, and Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the New York Times the pandemic delayed work by at least two months.

According to Boston Consulting Group’s Brian Collie, broad commercialization of AVs won’t happen before 2025 or 2026 — at least three years later than originally anticipated.

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U.S. will unveil data-sharing platform for autonomous vehicle testing

June 15, 2020 Big Data

(Reuters) — On Monday, U.S. auto safety regulators will unveil a voluntary effort to collect and make available nationwide data on existing autonomous vehicle testing.

U.S. states have a variety of regulations governing self-driving testing and data disclosure, and there is currently no centralized listing of all automated vehicle testing.

California, for example, requires public disclosure of all crashes involving self-driving vehicles, while other states do not.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is unveiling the Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing (AV TEST) initiative to provide “an online, public-facing platform for sharing automated driving system on-road testing activities.”

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With many opinion polls showing deep skepticism about self-driving cars in the U.S., the effort aims to boost public awareness. NHTSA plans “online mapping tools” that will eventually show testing locations and activity data.

NHTSA deputy administrator James Owens said in an interview that providing better transparency “encourages everybody to up their game to help better ensure that the testing is done in a manner fully consistent with safety.”

Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Uber, Alphabet’s self-driving company Waymo, and Cruise — General Motors’ majority-owned self-driving subsidiary — are expected to take part. Participating states include California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, officials said.

NHTSA’s goal is to “pull together really critical stakeholders to deepen the lines of communication and cooperation among all of us,” Owens said, adding the effort was “an opportunity for the states to start sharing information among themselves.”

NHTSA will hold events this week to kick off the initiative, including panels featuring companies involved in autonomous vehicle testing, such as Nuro, Beep, Waymo, Uber, and Toyota.

Critics say NHTSA should mandate federal safety standards for automated driving systems.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in its investigation of the March 2018 death of a pedestrian in a crash with an Uber test vehicle — the first attributed to a self-driving car — said in November that NHTSA should make self-driving vehicle safety assessments mandatory and ensure automated vehicles have appropriate safeguards.

Owens said NHTSA “will not hesitate” to take action if it believes unsafe vehicles are being tested on U.S. roads, but it has not adopted NTSB’s recommendations.

(Reporting by David Shepardson, editing by Peter Cooney.)

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Tag Archives: Autonomous

Nuro becomes first company to receive commercial autonomous vehicle permit from California DMV

Gatik raises $25 million for autonomous short-haul delivery trucks

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Waymo to expand autonomous truck testing in the American Southwest

Amazon acquires autonomous vehicle startup Zoox

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U.S. will unveil data-sharing platform for autonomous vehicle testing

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