Autonomous truck developer TuSimple has established a partnership with automotive supplier ZF to develop and commercialise technology for autonomous trucks.
The partnership, which will begin in April 2020, covers markets including North America, Europe and China.
TuSimple and ZF will co-develop “production-quality technologies” including cameras, lidar, radar, steering and ZF’s automotive-grade central computer ZF ProAI.
Concurrently, ZF will support TuSimple’s pre-production driverless autonomous system, and will ultimately serve as the default supplier for its production-ready system for commercialised vehicles.
Chuck Price, chief product officer, TuSimple. “Working side-by-side with ZF to refine and integrate our production-ready technology has allowed us to optimise our hardware stack and focus on scaling these technologies to make it possible for autonomous ready trucks to be mass produced.”
As part of the partnership, ZF will contribute engineering support to validate and integrate TuSimple’s autonomous system into the vehicle.
Torsten Gollewski, executive vice president, autonomous mobility systems at ZF, added: “A key success factor for virtual driver software is to ensure the system is based on an automotive grade level, including component development and production.
“The combination of ZF automotive system competencies and TuSimple’s virtual driver software will create the first commercial-ready automotive grade autonomous truck technology platform.”
TuSimple currently operates a fleet of more than 40 autonomous trucks, has 18 contracted customers and makes 20 autonomous trips between Arizona and Texas for companies such as UPS every week.
The company plans to start driverless operations in 2021.
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