From closed course to public roads: The path to driverless

Self-driving systems will only have a meaningful and commercially viable impact when they can operate safely in a wide range of complex and unpredictable conditions. In autonomous trucking, that requires driving on both highways and surface streets in order to truly unlock the future of freight transportation.

As Waabi progresses toward realizing this vision by building a highly performant self-driving system that can safely scale, the next step is to validate that the Waabi Driver can safely operate without a human on board, first in a controlled environment on a closed course before doing so on public roads. 

In October, we achieved this major milestone. After a rigorous safety assessment, spanning the entire design, implementation, and operation of the Waabi Driver, we then successfully completed autonomy missions on a closed-course with no human on board -- safely, smoothly, and entirely autonomously from start to end.

How We Achieved Closed-Course Driverless

While our autonomy software has been highly performant in complex real-world conditions for many months ahead of this milestone, significant development work was needed to enable driverless operations when there is no longer a human inside of the vehicle. This included engineering a vehicle platform with the necessary redundancies for driverless operations, developing an onboard fault management system to continuously monitor the health of the fully driverless vehicle, and building a solution that enables remote mission management.

Engineering a Vehicle Platform for Driverless Operations

We believe that vertically integrating the Waabi Driver directly into an OEM’s autonomy-ready, fully redundant platform is the path forward to bring safe, robust autonomous vehicles to public roads. However, because these platforms have not received all necessary approvals and validation for driverless deployment yet, we implemented these redundancies into a small development fleet of autonomous trucks for closed course driverless testing. This process involved both the design and manufacturing of in-house components, as well as the integration of components from our suppliers, to provide redundancies in power distribution, computing, steering, and braking. These systems allow us to confidently and safely control the vehicle at all times, even in the case of an extremely rare hardware failure. 

Crafting an Onboard Fault Monitoring and Management System 

In the case of supervised autonomy systems, human operators that are onboard the vehicle are responsible for monitoring whether the system is working correctly. For example, in the rare situation in which they see an unhealthy system diagnostic, they will take over control of the vehicle and stop in a safe place while determining whether to continue. In fully driverless systems, you no longer have this human-based redundancy and the autonomy system itself is responsible for making these sorts of decisions. To tackle this challenge, we built a comprehensive fault monitoring and management system on board our trucks which continuously monitors the health of the vehicle and autonomy system, and takes the appropriate fallback action to ensure that the vehicle is always operating safely in all circumstances.

Enabling Remote Mission Management

When there isn’t a human onboard, the autonomy system needs to be engaged remotely to begin operations. Waabi has built a proprietary cloud platform and an app for our team to define autonomy missions, launch vehicles, and continuously monitor their health and progress as they operate driverlessly. We believe that remote systems cannot be relied upon for real-time control of the vehicle or any safety critical operations due to potential network latency or outages. Instead, this remote assistance system enables us to provide high-level instructions to the onboard autonomy system to execute upon, such as defining a new route.

Enacting Best-in-Class Driverless Safety Standards

Since beginning our closed course driver-out runs at our Phoenix test track, we’ve proven that the Waabi Driver is capable of driverless operations when paired with a fully redundant hardware platform. This milestone is the culmination of our best-in-class approach to safety and reflects our shared commitment to safety alongside our partners like NVIDIA. Looking ahead, Waabi is excited to explore and leverage future innovations, such as NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion, as part of its continued work to advance safe, scalable autonomy.

Stay tuned for more exciting news.