Nuro's small utility vehicles are only for sale and are unmanned. The vehicles, which are only half the size of traditional models and operate only in cities and suburbs, are not traveling at high speeds. The first will come on stream this year.
Driverless cars that deliver on-demand services are coming to reality, but two former Google driverless car engineers think faster, less-manned vehicles will be ready faster. In fact, it will be available this year.
To meet this goal, Nuro, co-founded by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun 'JZ' Zhu, raised 92 million in Round A financing led by Chinese venture capital firm Banyan Capital and Silicon Valley's Greylock Partners USD, Reid Hoffman is partner. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Nuro is building an initial fleet of six unmanned electric vehicles, each about half the size of a passenger car Size, can be daily necessities, food orders, flowers, parcels and boxes sent to cities and suburbs of families and businesses.
Ferguson told Forbes: "We hope this year will be able to provide useful services. Obviously, this area is very limited and there will not be thousands of people involved, but we hope they can serve real customers."
For the past month, Nuro has been Aurora, the second company to research autonomous driving technology, leading companies such as Chris Urmson, former head of Google's driverless car project, and Sterling, former head of Tesla's Autopilot team, Sterling Anderson Nuro's schedule shows that Alphabet's Waymo driverless pickup fleet has started serving in Phoenix and will begin commercialization of Google's nearly 10 years of driverless car research beginning this year.Reuters / Ipsos A survey shows that most U.S. citizens seem to have concerns about this technology even if the first projects are ready for launch.
Plans from Nuro and Waymo, as well as plans from dozens of other automotive and technology companies, mark the beginning of a new transportation era when the internal combustion engine replaced horses and now the traffic era is once again welcoming the inevitable shift. The DARPA launched a legendary contest funded by the federal government, DARPA Challenges, to develop driverless technology when Ferguson was one of Carnegie Mellon University's team Since then, Ferguson, like Urmson, formerly at Google, has been involved in driverless car technology, and both he and JZ Urmson left Google in the summer of 2016 to start their career.
Nuro co-founders Dave Ferguson (left) and Jiajun 'JZ' Zhu, former members of Google's driverless car project, have raised $ 92 million (about 600 million yuan) to bring unmanned delivery vehicles to market.
For example, Ford and Domino Melody tested the delivery of pizza in a driverless car in Michigan, and in January Toyota demonstrated a concept car, the e-Palette, at CES, in conjunction with Uber , Pizza Hut, Amazon etc. e-Palette A larger version of the Nuro concept that can only be configured as a driverless van or passenger car is unlikely to be commercially available for at least two years.
Nuro has tested traditional vehicles equipped with unmanned software and hardware in California to reverse the situation since 2016, but is shifting its focus to models that are similar to rolling storage cabinets, powered by small batteries, although vehicles can not Driving on freeways can not drive at high speeds, but deploying a large number of vehicles on highways depends on whether federal and state laws permit or not and these regulations have not yet been finalized.
Turning to when and where Nauto's autotransport service started, Ferguson declined to say what big retailers it may partner with Nuro, such as Amazon.com, and declined to say whether it plans to deploy a vehicle in China, which has seen driverless technology as heavy In the early stages, small shops and businesses such as dry cleaners, restaurants and grocery stores will benefit from automated rapid delivery services.
Ferguson did not explain much: "We are discussing what we can do with potential retail partners and how we can get them out quickly, but we also think it helps us make use of local retailers and other providers of goods and services in The influence of the communities in which they live, no matter how large or small ... With this service they suddenly have access to logistical capabilities that rival their biggest competitors and reach out to everyone in the community through one service. "
Nuro's small dedicated unmanned vehicles feature the same advanced sensing devices as the unmanned vehicles of Waymo, GM Cruise and U-Pb: laser LiDARs for creating 3D, high-definition images, advanced cameras and radar. Nuro's vehicles do not require the same level of remote visibility and can use less expensive hardware because they do not travel at high speeds and on the freeway. Also, because of their small size and unmanned traffic, With less material, no airbags, seat belts or other occupant-oriented safety equipment, Ferguson said these differences make cars cheaper and may be safer than manned, driverless vehicles.
Not only does not it take into account the need to consider things that have to be taken into consideration, such as seat belts, crash protection, airbags, etc., and to change the vehicle's behavior so that the vehicle is more focused on the vehicle than on the car.
Driverless cars encounter a 'tram problem' in decision making: Assuming an unmanned vehicle encounters an emergency, it may be obliged to avoid it at some point, which may cause injury to passengers on board or outside of the vehicle .
Ferguson said: 'On-demand design of vehicles dedicated to the transport of goods can in fact create the safest road vehicles that will care for the most disadvantaged of road users and not for anything contained in it. Instead of hitting a pedestrian, you can actually hit a tree because it knows one of the results is definitely safer than the other.