Germany’s Continental AG, a technologies and services company and Pennsylvania-based Aurora Innovation, an autonomous freight solutions 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.
“Technologies for autonomous mobility present the biggest opportunity to transform driving behavior since the creation of the automobile,” Philipp von Hirschheydt, executive board member for the Continental Automotive Group sector, said. “Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand.”
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.
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.
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.
Continental will showcase its latest technologies at the Las Vegas Convention Center Jan. 9 through Jan. 12.