Aurora Opens Lidar Testing Facility in Montana
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Aurora Innovation opened a 78,000-square-foot office and testing facility in Bozeman, Mont., on Dec. 12.
Located on Montana State University’s Innovation Campus, the facility is designed to support development and testing of Aurora’s FirstLight Lidar technology, the autonomous trucking specialist said.
The facility includes research and development labs, a manufacturing area with a clean room and a garage for vehicle testing, plus office and collaboration spaces.
Aurora acquired Blackmore, a lidar specialist based in Bozeman, in 2019. In July 2020, utilizing Blackmore lidar architecture and digital signal processing, Aurora debuted the first generation of FirstLight Lidar, which can detect objects at more than 450 meters away, aiding highway driving capabilities for autonomous trucks.
“From early on, we knew Montana’s photonics leadership would be invaluable for bringing safe, scalable self-driving technology to the world,” said Chris Urmson, Aurora CEO. “Our new Bozeman office deepens our commitment to the region and strengthens our ability to expand our fleet of autonomous trucks.”
The opening was attended by elected officials, regulators and community leaders and came only a day after Aurora partner Volvo Autonomous Solutions announced the start of commercial operations for its VNL Autonomous tractor.
Aurora's Montana facility in daylight. (Aurora Innovation)
Four Aurora terminals in Texas — Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and El Paso — support the VAS freight runs with DHL Supply Chain. VAS has an operations center in Fort Worth.
VAS is hauling commercial freight for DHL in supervised autonomous runs, with vehicle operators behind the wheel while the truck is operating autonomously.
Aurora expects to launch fully self-driving trips commercially in April 2025, with the autonomous trucks operating without a vehicle operator in the truck. Aurora has yet to reveal which platform the self-driving trucks will launch on.
In addition to working with VAS, Aurora is collaborating on autonomous trucks with Paccar Inc., parent company of Kenworth and Peterbilt.
Until a couple of months ago, Pittsburgh-based Aurora was saying fully autonomous commercial runs would begin by the end of 2024.
(Aurora Innovation)
In an Oct. 30 presentation, Aurora executives said the safety case for the Houston-to-Dallas route was 97% ready as of late October.
As many as 10 driverless trucks will carry out commercial runs from the spring, they said. In the back half of 2025, Aurora expects to boost its product capabilities, add new lanes and raise capacity to tens of trucks.
Aurora is working with other companies in the autonomous transportation ecosystem too, including tire maker Continental, FedEx, Hirschbach Motor Lines, Ryder System Inc., Schneider National, Toyota, Uber Freight, Uber Inc. and Werner Enterprises.
FedEx ranks No. 2 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in North America, while Ryder ranks No. 6, Schneider No. 9, Werner No. 16 and Hirschbach No. 55. In the truckload segment, Werner ranks No. 4, Ryder No. 5 and Schneider No. 7. Hirschbach is the No. 4-ranked refrigerated carrier. Uber Freight ranks No. 13 on the logistics TT100.
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