Autonomous truck developer Torc Robotics has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider.
As the Mercedes-Benz-owned company prepares to deploy its fleet of self-driving test trucks in New Mexico and Virginia, USA it said AWS will handle the scale and speed needed for data transfer, storage, and compute capacity.
Torc is working to commercialise a Level 4 autonomous system that will be offered to trucking customers. With growth in its test fleet size, number of routes and sensor capability, there is an increase in data ingestion and analysis needed.
AWS’s capabilities are designed to provide rapid, secure data transfer, intelligent tiered storage, managed orchestration and analytics tools, as well as high-performance multi-core CPU and GPU compute. According to Torc, this will help it scale its development platform and accelerate testing to commercialise the technology.
Wendy Bauer, director of automotive sales at AWS, said: “The race to develop self-driving vehicles generates massive volumes of data from many types of sensors.
“With AWS, Torc engineers have the speed, flexibility, and insights they need to design tests, run simulations at scale, and refine their experiments using a broad range of highly specialised compute instance types”
Torc’s test fleet in New Mexico generates petabytes of data from tests on public roads. Torc’s end-to-end software stack collects and processes raw data from multiple sensors such as lidar, radar and cameras.
Furthermore, the company’s next generation of test trucks include more sensors at higher resolutions to enhance object detection at longer ranges. This further increases the magnitude of data for analysis, simulation, and machine learning.
“Our next-generation fleet of test trucks will help us rapidly grow our capabilities and accelerate the commercialisation of Level 4 self-driving trucks,” said Michael Fleming, Torc CEO.
“Our ability to handle the data involved must be able to keep up – whether it’s for transfer, storage, or scaling our simulation capability. With AWS, we have a trusted solution that provides the computing scale, transfer speed, and security when we need it.”
