Aurora Innovation, Inc. Announces Development of the Aurora Beacon Platform to Allow Customers to Optimize Operations of Autonomous Vehicles for 24/7/365 Operation
Aurora Innovation, Inc. announced the development of the Aurora Beacon platform, its cloud-based mission control system designed to allow customers to optimize operations of autonomous vehicles for 24/7/365 operation. Aurora Beacon will help customers of Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, Aurora’s trucking and ride-hailing products, realize the full potential of their Aurora Driver-powered vehicles. With Aurora Beacon, customers will have unique access to real-time data of each Aurora Driver-powered vehicle,including its health, status, and current location. Aurora Beacon will also provide real-time alerts about vehicle status, ETA, traffic conditions, updates to missions, major weather events, and more. With these alerts and access to critical data, fleet managers can make fast, data-based decisions to tightly monitor, coordinate, remotely observe, redirect, and support their autonomous vehicles. For example, when decreasing tire pressure is detected and an alert is sent, a fleet manager can redirect the vehicle immediately to a service center. This level of insight into and control over the real-time location, status, and objectives of autonomous vehicles will help Aurora’s customers maximize their utilization and responsiveness to shifting conditions and network demands. Another module of Aurora Beacon is a remote support tool that allows remote support specialists to provide high-level guidance to Aurora Driver-powered vehicles when they encounter a situation where the autonomy solution is unclear, like bespoke interactions with law enforcement officials. This will allow Aurora Driver-powered vehicles to tackle increasingly complex scenarios in a scalable and cost-effective way. Aurora Beacon is actively being used to manage and support Aurora’s own fleet operations today, from scheduling, dispatch, monitoring, coordination, and remote support. Aurora has uniquely designed its commercial pilots with FedEx, Uber Freight, and Werner and its collaboration with U.S. Xpress to exercise and refine the totality of its Aurora Horizon product suite, which includes the Aurora Driver and Aurora Beacon. As the company approaches commercial deployment, Aurora Beacon is expected to transition from a first-party tool to one that carriers, fleets, and networks can incorporate into their existing systems via API.