Uber Freight Expands Autonomous Truck Pilot with Aurora for Peak Season – Fleet Administration

Uber Freight and Aurora are “deepening” their autonomous-truck pilot with a brand new 600-mile lane between Dallas/Fort Price and El Paso. Weekly hauls started final month for packing options distributor Veritiv and can proceed by way of and past the 2022 vacation season.

The pilot gives important first-hand learnings round autonomous truck deployment, making a blueprint for a way the Aurora Driver will probably be built-in, safely deployed, and scaled throughout the Uber Freight community within the coming years. Testing throughout this peak season additionally highlights autonomous vans’ potential affect when demand shortly fluctuates.

This collaboration brings collectively Aurora Horizon, Aurora’s autonomous trucking service, with Uber Freight’s logistics community to unlock autonomous quantity for carriers.

“Our intensive and environment friendly digital market is a key ingredient for autonomous freight deployment,” stated Lior Ron, CEO of Uber Freight.

Within the pilot, packaging merchandise and items are autonomously pushed to Veritiv warehouses, together with retailers, faculties, and healthcare suppliers, in western Texas and New Mexico. These packages are autonomously transported greater than 600 miles between Aurora’s terminals with on-time supply, which is important through the vacation season.

The three corporations will carefully monitor and look at information on supply effectivity, transit occasions, operations on the switch hubs, autonomous capabilities and efficiency, and buyer satisfaction.

“Veritiv’s next-generation provide chain technique is to create and maintain a aggressive benefit in operations with revolutionary and environment friendly applied sciences,” stated Mike Walkenhorst, Veritiv SVP of world operations and growing companies. “This autonomous automobile pilot aligns with our technique to assess new applied sciences to find out the most effective match for our enterprise and our clients.”

Uber Freight’s multiphase industrial autonomous trucking pilot started in December 2021 to raised perceive how the Aurora Driver will assist carriers maximize fleet utilization, broaden alternatives to soundly haul items, and streamline provide operations.

The pilot continues to develop, with autonomous masses greater than doubling over the previous 12 months. This newest enlargement in Texas now unlocks an extended lane for additional autonomous trucking testing and insights throughout completely different working fashions, which Aurora will incorporate into its subscription service for carriers

“The vacations are a difficult time for the logistics business. We’re crafting Aurora Horizon to assist carriers of all sizes alleviate among the provide chain pressures that sometimes accompany them,” stated Sterling Anderson, chief product officer and co-founder of Aurora. “Deploying our expertise with the Uber Freight workforce over this 600-mile journey on the peak of the season is an outgrowth of our mutual dedication to make sure that Aurora Horizon can allow carriers of all sizes to soundly and effectively haul freight 24/7/365 on the Uber Freight community.”

These autonomous belongings are deployed alongside human drivers in a hybrid hub-to-hub mannequin, with self-driving vans dealing with the long-haul center mile and native carriers from the Uber Freight platform on the shorter first-and last-mile hauls.

In an announcement, Uber Freight stated it’s “excited to proceed innovating and increasing our autonomous pilot applications in 2023, enabling extra shippers to start shifting freight autonomously within the American Southwest and past as this expertise additional integrates into carriers’ operations.”