Volvo Cars has unveiled what it claims is the first production ready autonomous truck in a collaboration with autonomous technology vendor Aurora Innovation.
The truck was announced at ACT Expo in Las Vegas.
The autonomous truck is designed and built to increase freight capacity across the U.S. The platform will allow Volvo to use in-house developed virtual drivers for trucks and machines that work with confined applications and partner virtual driving technologies for on-highway trucking applications.
“We are at the forefront of a new way to transport goods, complementing and enhancing transportation capacity, and thereby enabling trade and societal growth,” said Nils Jaeger, president of Volvo Autonomous Solutions. “This truck is the first of our standardized global autonomous technology platform, which will enable us to introduce additional models in the future, bringing autonomy to all Volvo Group truck brands, and to other geographies and use cases.”
The autonomous truck will be assembled at Volvo’s flagship New River Valley plant in Dublin, Virginia. This plant is Volvo’s largest truck plant and it will be used to build the trucks in high-volume production.
What’s in the truck?
Volvo and Aurora worked to integrate Aurora Driver technology along with Volvo’s Level 4 autonomous driving system. Aurora Driver features AI software, dual computers and a proprietary lidar. The lidar allows for object detection over 400 meters away, high-resolution cameras, imaging radar and additional sensors.
Additionally, Aurora Driver has been tested on a virtual suite where it has driven billions of miles along with 1.5 million commercial miles on public roads. There the technology traversed highways, rural roadways and surface streets during the day and night through good and bad weather.
Volvo’s automated technology includes redundant steering, braking, communication, computation, power management, energy storage and vehicle motion management systems.
