The CEO of Aurora Innovation Inc. met before U.S. congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to explain what autonomous vehicle technology has accomplished and where it might be heading in the years to come.
Chris Urmson, who co-founded Strip District-based Aurora in 2016, was joined by Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association Executive Director Jeff Farrah, American Trucking Associations President Chris Spear and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety President Cathy Chase as part of a nearly four-hour discussion hosted by the U.S. House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure.
Over a dozen representatives from across the country asked the panelists for their opinions and understandings of how this technology might be deployed and how it can be secured from cybersecurity threats, whether those threats be from lone or state actors.
Many representatives also raised concerns about the impact this tech will have on the trucking industry's 1.8 million-person workforce. Farrah and Spear consistently argued that the current gap of about 80,000 workers is reason enough alone for their belief that this technology will complement and add to the workforce, not replace it.
It's a belief Urmson held as well, though he also said his company's efforts will ideally bring about safer road conditions for everyone who uses them.
Aurora has been actively testing its self-driving trucks on various highways in Texas with human operators on board for several years and Urmson said he recalled there only being three incidents that have occurred in that time, all of which did not involve an Aurora-equipped truck as being at fault.
"I think this is one of the places where there's an opportunity, where we see, to leverage modern technology," Urmson said. "For example, when our trucks are driving down the road, every second they're evaluating thousands of different parameters to ensure that they're operating at peak performance, whether that's the cycle times, the computation, the health of the sensors, the health of the base platform."
U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-California, then cut Urmson off to ask why such developments should be done when efforts to bring autonomous technologies to railroads, which have dedicated paths with much fewer obstacles than heavily trafficked highway lanes, have also been slow to be adopted in recent years. He also asked how these automated technologies will be able to adapt to more rural conditions like moving timber products out of forests along narrow and winding roads to those that are much larger and more dense with traffic.
Urmson responded by noting this technology isn't going to be deployed instantaneously and with the capability of working for every scenario upon its launch, which Aurora is hoping to start offering via a commercial subscription service by the end of 2024.
"We don't see this as a big bang deployment all at once, we expect this technology to roll out incrementally," Urmson said. "We will initially target long-haul trips on interstates. Eventually, I could imagine this technology operating in those environments, but that won't be the initial deployment. This is how we have so much confidence that this will be complimentary to the skills of our human driving."
Concerns about how the technology would work in extreme weather conditions like smoke from wildfires or snowfall from blizzards also came up during the hearing. Urmson invoked the company's founding in Pittsburgh as a testament to Aurora's willingness to validate its tech across all four seasons and the various elements they might bring.
"Even in the first year that we were developing the technology, we were out in a parking lot testing in snow," Urmson said. "Once again, we're able to constrain the technology. So if the weather is so inclement that it shouldn't operate, then it won't."
