Societally transformative products often require supporting infrastructure to unlock their full potential. Airplanes delivered tremendous societal value once supported by an ecosystem that included air traffic control and robust ground operations. Similarly, the true opportunity of smartphones was realized when paired with application ecosystems and near-ubiquitous data networks.

Construction is a common feature on many of our nation’s major freight corridors, so to operate on the U.S. highway system and deliver goods for our commercial partners safely and on time, the Aurora Driver must be able to navigate construction zones autonomously.

As Aurora continues to grow and prepare for the launch of Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect—our autonomous trucking and ride-hailing products—reliable and scalable computing power only becomes more important. In the third and final part of our series on Aurora’s Supercomputer, Batch API, we will discuss the future of our platform and how Batch API is scaling to a billion tasks a day.

Hardware design plays a critical role in our path to market. With our world-class product team and platform (OEM) partners, we’ve developed a hardware kit that’s transferable between vehicles. Our hardware enables the Aurora Driver to power both trucks and cars, unlocking the successive launches of Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect.

Autonomous vehicles understand the world by processing enormous amounts of data acquired via sensors. We use this data to train machine learning (ML) models to detect objects surrounding the vehicles, forecast their future behaviors, and plan the autonomous vehicles’ next movements.

Last year, Aurora released our Safety Case Framework, an industry-first, evidence-supported argument for how we’ll demonstrate that our autonomous trucks and passenger vehicles are acceptably safe for public roads.