PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ: AUR) today 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.
“Self-driving vehicles will provide much-needed capacity to carriers, networks, and fleets, allowing them to respond to unmet demand and grow their business. Unlocking their full potential to go beyond what conventional vehicles can do, requires the right operational tools. We’re designing those tools in the Aurora Beacon platform,” said Sterling Anderson, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder at Aurora.
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 flagship 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.
“Fleets today have developed a variety of different tools to manage their vehicles,” added Anderson. “We’re designing Aurora Beacon to integrate with these systems to provide unprecedented control and information, key for unlocking the full potential of the Aurora Driver.”
Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This Press Release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. All statements contained in this press release that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including but not limited, to those statements around the commercialization efforts and developments in activities between FedEx and Aurora. These statements are based on management’s current assumptions and are neither promises nor guarantees, but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. For factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, please see the risks and uncertainties identified under the heading “Risk Factors” section of Aurora Innovation, Inc.’s (“Aurora”) Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, filed with the SEC on March 11, 2022, and other documents filed by Aurora from time to time with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements reflect our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date of this press release. Aurora undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
About Aurora
Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly to make transportation safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. The Aurora Driver is a self-driving system designed to operate multiple vehicle types, from freight-hauling semi-trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles, and underpins Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, its driver-as-a-service products for trucking and ride-hailing. Aurora is partnered with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem, including Toyota, FedEx, Volvo Trucks, PACCAR, Uber, Uber Freight, U.S. Xpress, and Werner. To learn more, visit www.aurora.tech.
